


Defined By the Lines

by catatonic1242



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adam Milligan is Not Forgotten, Anal Sex, Angelic Grace, Angelic Possession, Angst, Apocalypse, Blow Jobs, Boys Kissing, Bunker Sex, Canon Related, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Castiel in the Bunker, Castiel/Dean Winchester First Time, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2018, Death, Domestic, Drama, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, Frottage, Graceless Castiel, Human Castiel, Impala Makeouts, Jesus-Fuck, Kissing, Loss of Grace, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker, Michael!Dean, Original Character(s), Possession, Post-Season/Series 13, Season/Series 13 Spoilers, Show tunes, The Cage, Toast, Werewolves, it's the end of the world as we know it, not in that order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-13 14:22:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16019741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catatonic1242/pseuds/catatonic1242
Summary: Things have finally settled down a little for Dean after the chaos that Michael wrought. There’s no drama on the horizon, no looming crisis to be averted - there’s just Dean and Cas slowly but joyfully building a “normal” life together.  It’s nothing that Dean ever thought he’d have and everything he always wanted.*****It’s the Apocalypse and the end is nigh. Michael is sounding the trumpets of Revelation. He’s using the Michael Sword to tear the Earth to shreds, killing everyone and everything in his path. As the end of humanity approaches, what lines are Cas, Jack, and Sam willing cross to stop Michael? And how far will Cas go to save his world?





	1. Absquatulate

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2018 Dean/Cas Big Bang.
> 
> Takes place post-13.23. No spoilers for season 14.
> 
> Please take a moment to reread the archive warnings before proceeding.
> 
> I owe an absolutely enormous debt of gratitude to my ever-patient beta reader, [Mrs. Hays](https://mrshays.tumblr.com/), who can be reached for beta requests at [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrshays). She's tireless, thorough, encouraging and collaborative, and this story wouldn't be what it is without her. Any mistakes that remain are solely mine.
> 
> My amazing artist is [alpacasfluff](http://alpacasfluff.tumblr.com/). This pairing has been a privilege.
> 
> Find me on [tumblr](http://catatonic1242.tumblr.com/).
> 
>  _“We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or be confined by.”_ \- A. S. Byatt

_Absquatulate (v.): To leave without saying goodbye._

It is dark in his bedroom, a thick, soothing blackness that wraps around him like a blanket. It’s the same color behind his eyelids as it is in the room, which always makes waking up disorienting for the first few moments. Dean reaches a hand out and immediately finds the lamp on his bedside table. When it flickers to life, he has to blink against the light several times. He rubs the sleep out of the corners of his eyes and stretches. His back and elbows pop now, in ways they never did when he was ten years younger, but such is the life of a hunter. He never thought he’d see the other side of 40. Now, it’s not creeping up on him - it’s barreling at him like a freight train.

Dean pulls back the sheet and sits up as he grabs his phone. The display reads 6:07am and he has no missed calls or text messages. Things have been quiet out in the world for a while, ever since they closed the rift to the Apocalypse World.

He has no problem admitting that it’s nice to sleep through a whole night - even multiple nights in a row - and wake up in his own bed without drama or a crisis or the end of the fucking world. He can go whole days without feeling that shaky compulsion to pour a glass or three of whiskey or polish off a six pack. It’s been weeks since he had to scrub blood out from under his fingernails or drink horrible gas station coffee. And he hasn’t even gotten the itch to hit the road. If he were a different man, he would think maybe it’s finally, _finally_ about time.

Time for him to finally go after, to get, to _have_ , all of those things Dean has never let himself have before. Those things he hasn’t even let himself hope for in years. Maybe it’s time to do the things he’s never done but always wanted to. Maybe it’s time to settle down, to build a life, a _real_ life, with someone he loves.

But he’s not a different man. He doesn’t think it. Really. Instead, he takes his time getting out of bed, lounging around for a long while. He scrolls through a few newspapers on his phone, the old habit of looking for weird news not something he’s willing to give up. When there’s nothing noteworthy, he plays a few games. There’s this one with a wizard and a panda fighting a dragon by way of a tile-matching game. Even though he’s kinda shit at it, he manages to level up.

He’s finally run out of lives when he hears the faint clang of running water in the pipes that indicates Sam is awake. Dean clicks off his phone and stands, his bare feet tickling against the soft rug and then slapping against the polished concrete floor as he makes his way over to the sink and wets his toothbrush. As he brushes his teeth, he looks at himself in the mirror, studying the lines that run from his nose to the corners of his mouth, wondering if they’re getting deeper. He’s grateful he hasn’t started to go grey - it seems that Sammy’s taken that genetic hit for Team Winchester. Dean spits into the sink and then makes his way over to the small chest of drawers, pulling on a pair of pajama bottoms over his boxers. Tucking his phone into the pocket, he heads toward the kitchen.

The smell of coffee reaches him before he descends the few steps into the room. It smells warm and inviting, even though Dean knows the coffee is going to be shit. It’s not really about the coffee. No, that smell means someone is waiting for him, sitting in the kitchen. It’s been like this every morning lately. No matter what time Dean wakes up, Cas is sitting in the kitchen, coffee at the ready. That’s why the coffee is shit - Cas can only taste the individual molecules. It’s always just a little too bitter, which Dean doesn’t totally understand - it’s not like Cas is roasting the beans himself. But Dean doesn’t have the heart to tell Cas because bitter coffee in a warm kitchen with Cas is far better than no coffee in a cold, empty kitchen.

Cas is perched at the table, a book spread out in front of him. He greets Dean without looking up.

“Good morning. I made coffee.”

“Thanks,” Dean says, grabbing a mug from the shelf and pouring a cup. “Whatcha reading this morning?” Dean asks, sliding into the seat across from Cas. Dean hides his wince at the first taste of the coffee.

Cas dog-ears his page and closes the book. Dean reads the cover: _Did You Ever Have a Family?_ Dean glances back and forth between the book and Cas and cocks an eyebrow.

“A little light reading?” Dean asks, trying to keep his tone neutral.

Cas only supplies, “It caught my eye.”

“I thought Metatron dumped the whole history of pop culture into your brain,” Dean says, sipping from his steaming cup.

“Yes,” Cas concedes, “but this was published after that. I don’t have knowledge of it.”

“Huh,” is the best reply Dean can come up with. There’s a long pause before he feels compelled to fill the silence. “Breakfast?” he finally asks.

They do this every morning, too. A little polite conversation, occasionally some back and forth banter, and then Dean offers to make breakfast. Eggs or pancakes or every once in a while, Dean will actually pull out the squeaky old waffle iron. But every morning, Cas declines.

“Actually, I was thinking about a piece of toast,” Cas says.

Dean isn’t sure what exactly to say to that. This is the first time in the weeks since this routine started that Cas has taken him up on breakfast. Dean’s so used to the polite ‘No, thank you’ he usually gets that he’s not prepared for any other answer. As a result, Dean very intelligently says, “...Toast?”

“With jam.” Cas says, “Or jelly; I’m not totally clear on the difference between jam and jelly.”

It’s reflexive, the way that Dean starts to answer with the punchline to the old joke, “I can’t jelly my…” He cuts himself off before he gets too far, feeling the tips of his ears turn red.

“Dean?” Cas asks. He’s looking across the table at Dean, his expression innocent and curious.

“Nevermind!” Dean says hurriedly. “I think we have some strawberry jelly. Or jam. Or… whatever.” He ducks his head and climbs out of his seat, heading for the refrigerator.

When breakfast is just about ready, Sam passes through. As usual, he doesn’t join them, electing instead to snag a banana on his way out. He’s heading for a run, leaving Cas and Dean alone at the table. An easy, familiar silence falls between the two of them as Dean eats.

Dean is chasing the last forkful of scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese around his plate when he notices that Cas hasn’t touched his toast.

“What’s going on, man?” Dean asks, gesturing at Cas's plate with his knife.

Cas stares thoughtfully at the slice in front of him. Dean had slathered it very generously with orange marmalade - they didn’t have strawberry jam or jelly after all - and there are a few rivulets dripping down the sides. “I don’t know why I asked for this,” Cas says. “I know I won’t be able to taste it.”

Dean is taken aback by the wistful expression on Cas's face and he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know where the sudden desire to taste is coming from - Cas hasn’t been able to taste anything since he was briefly human nearly four years ago. Dean doesn’t like to think too much about that particular bit of history. There are a lot of things in his life that he’s ashamed of, but that one is near the top of his list. Instead of falling down that self-loathing rabbit-hole, he bites his lip and considers for a few seconds, then answers, “You won’t know until you try it.”

“Isn’t it better to not know and have hope than to know and be disappointed?”

Suddenly, Dean isn’t sure they’re talking about the toast anymore. There’s an odd quirk to Cas’s eyebrow, a small tilt to his head. Even though Cas can be the most literal person Dean knows, Dean isn’t on solid ground with this conversation. He picks the best reply he can think of, one that answers all of the questions that are possibly being asked. “Well, then, you try again. ‘Dream until your dreams come true’ and all that.”

Cas narrows his eyes. “I don’t dream; I don’t sleep,” he states.

Okay, so, question answered - they’re apparently going literal with this conversation. “Man, I _know_ , I just mean, this isn’t your only chance at toast. You can try toast whenever you want toast.” As he finishes his sentence, Dean realizes, _he’s_ not talking about toast. _Cas doesn’t dream_ , Dean reminds himself. _Literal._

Cas seems convinced. He rips a corner off of the piece and pops it into his mouth. He chews contemplatively at first, but then a smile tugs at his mouth. He breaks out into a full-on grin, the likes of which Dean can’t ever remember seeing. It’s bright and toothy and it crinkles the corners of Cas’s eyes in a way that makes Dean’s chest physically ache. With his mouth full Cas exclaims, “I can taste it!” He tears the rest of the piece in half and shoves it in his mouth.

“Whoa… what? Slow down, you’ll choke,” Dean says. “You can _taste_ it?”

Cas nods enthusiastically and grabs Dean’s coffee, taking a sip to wash down his giant bite. “Yes! It tastes… like it’s meant to,” he says. Cas sips at the coffee again and makes a face. “That coffee is horrible.”

Dean can’t help but throw his head back laughing, caught up in Cas's glee. “Yeah, it is.”

“May I?” Cas says, pointing at the last bite of Dean’s breakfast. Dean nods and pushes the plate to him. Cas shoves the eggs onto the fork with his finger, then takes the bite and makes a face.

“What?”

“It appears that I still do not like eggs.”

Dean pushes back and stands up from the table. “Then let’s find out what you _do_ like,” he offers.

Cas looks delighted. He joins Dean next to the pantry.

The pickings are slim, it’s just about time to head up to Hastings for their bi-weekly Walmart trip, but there are a few things on the shelves. Dean pulls out a jar of chunky peanut butter and a half-empty bag of chocolate chips. Smiling, he grabs a spoon from a drawer and hands it and the jar to Cas.

“I remember peanut butter,” Cas says. “I enjoyed it.”

“Let’s see if you still do,” Dean prompts, nodding at the jar.

Eagerly, Cas unscrews the top and, tossing it onto the counter, dips the spoon in. He takes a huge mouthful before Dean can stop him. When he tries to talk around it, the words come out as, “Uhhh cuuu taaa eee!”

Dean laughs again and pours out a fistful of chocolate chips. Cas takes three from Dean’s hand and pops them into his mouth before he’s even swallowed all of the peanut butter. Dean watches Cas chew, then asks, “So…?”

It takes several swallows for Cas to be able to speak around the peanut butter and chocolate, but when he does, he’s clearly elated. “What else can I taste?” Cas asks, glancing around the kitchen, then excitedly back at Dean.

Without thinking, Dean leans in and kisses him.

For a split second, Dean feels Cas tense against him. Dean pulls away, but before he can even start to apologize, Cas's mouth is back against his.

It starts slowly, small presses of their lips together, once, twice, three times. Then Dean flicks his tongue against the seam of Cas's mouth and Cas parts his lips.

Cas tastes intensely… red. Where there should be the too-sweet mingling of chocolate and peanut butter, there is instead the vibrant taste of sunset and wildfire and burning leaves. Like the too-bitter coffee, it leaves an itch at the back of Dean’s throat.

Startled, he pulls away and coughs twice. When he exhales, it tastes like smoke and ash.

“What the fuck?” Dean chokes.

Cas's eyes widen, and he raises his eyebrows. “Dean?”

Dean doesn’t know what to say. “You… that…” There is no fully-formed thought in his head.

“Dean?” Cas asks again. “Are you okay?”

“You taste red,” Dean supplies, the only explanation he has.

“I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“Man…” Dean trails off. He looks down at his hand and realizes that the remaining chocolate chips he’s been holding are half-melted in his clenched fist. He turns and grabs a kitchen towel from where it hangs off the stove and wipes at his palm. When he looks back up, Cas is nowhere to be found.

“Cas?”

There is no answer. Still holding the towel, Dean crosses the kitchen in a few short strides.

“Cas?” he calls out. He exits the kitchen and immediately finds himself in an ornate and endless hallway. The walls are covered in a creamy silk drapery as far as he can see and there are identical, intricately-carved, gilt doors tucked in every ten feet or so. Dean turns around in a circle, but the kitchen is nowhere to be seen - the hallway extends seemingly forever in both directions. There are more doors than he could possibly count.

He’s still dressed in his pajamas. Instinctively, he pats at his pockets, then his waistband. His cell phone is gone, and he is weaponless.

“Shit…” Dean mutters.


	2. Enouement

_Enouement (n.): The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out and not being able to tell your past self._

When the voice speaks inside his head, it startles him, and he drops the thick, leather-bound book he’s holding.

 _You taste red_.

He closes his eyes and concentrates, putting his fingers to his temples as if to strengthen whatever signal is carrying Dean’s voice to him.

It has been exactly thirteen months since Cas last heard Dean. 569,401 minutes of silence finally broken by three words. It feels like the first crack in a dam, and Castiel instantly wishes for the crack to grow wider.

He spent the months since Dean’s disappearance listening, searching the silence inside his head for any sign. For anything at all. Of course, he wasn’t only listening - he was looking, hunting, researching and trying to keep the shattered pieces of his heart contained beneath his skin. But he was also, every second, every minute, every hour, listening for Dean.

Ever since he dragged Dean up from Hell, Castiel has felt Dean’s soul like a beacon, shining bright and bold into the darkest places. He felt it when they were in Purgatory - he heard every prayer that Dean sent up, every single night. He heard the desperation, the frustration, the loneliness. He heard Dean when he was a demon, too, though that was dimmer, since his own stolen Grace was waning. But still, he heard the rage, felt the freedom that Dean felt. And even when Cas himself was possessed by Lucifer, he’d heard Dean. He’d willfully ignored it, pushed Dean’s presence down until it became a low buzz instead of a constant shouting, but he couldn’t shut it out entirely.

The only time that Cas hadn’t been able to feel Dean was when Cas was totally Graceless.

Sometimes, Dean’s feelings were impossible to read, like a vague ephemeral hum. Those were the frustrating times, when Cas didn’t know if he was needed or wanted or required. Those were the thoughts that flitted fast through Dean’s head, the ones that Cas couldn’t quite grab onto and didn’t have time to decipher.

Other times, Dean’s thoughts were as legible as newspaper headlines, like ticker tape he could pluck out of the air and read as plain as day. That’s what the last thought was like - Dean’s last thought before he said yes to Michael:

_I have to. I’m sorry. I love you._

And then, he was gone. And, powerless to do anything else, Cas sat and waited, listening to the hum of Dean’s soul as he and Michael battled with Lucifer. He sat and waited and listened and hated himself and his useless, broken wings that couldn’t carry him to Dean’s side. He listened and hoped for the opportunity to say the three words he’d said before plus the one word he’d always longed to add - _too_.

But the opportunity never came. Everything went silent.

“Cas?”

It was distinctly Dean. No question, Cas would know his voice anywhere, even (especially) inside his own head.

“Cas?!?”

Cas snaps his head up when Mary grabs him by the arms and shakes insistently.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He can finally focus on Mary’s worried face. “Mary?”

“What’s going on?”

“I heard him,” Cas offers. He puts a hand up to quiet Mary and closes his eyes to listen carefully. He reaches out, extending his Grace as far as he can, feeling and searching for Dean. Cas waits.

The only sound is Mary’s ragged breathing.

“Cas?” Mary whispers.

He takes one more long moment to listen. But there’s nothing. Cas opens his eyes and finds Mary still staring at him.

“I heard him,” Cas repeats. “I heard Dean.”

“You heard _Dean_?” Mary is incredulous. “Like, really heard him? What did he say? Are you sure it was him?”

“Yes,” he answers.

“What did he _say_?” Mary presses.

“He said, ‘You taste red.’”

“What? What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know, Mary. But it was Dean, I’m certain of it.”

He doesn’t know what it means, but there _are_ other things contained within those three words that Cas is also certain of. It is confirmation that Dean is alive, for one. That very thought makes something green and verdant start to uncoil in Cas's chest. Dean is alive. There had been no way to know for certain when Michael took over if Dean would survive and, if so, for how long. But now there is proof, rather than just fading hope.

And Dean is trapped, that much is clear to Cas as well. The way he had said, ‘You taste red...’ - there was no panic, no anger, no fear. It was like wonder. Like awe.

Suddenly, Cas knows how Michael is keeping Dean quiet. How Michael is keeping Dean from casting him out.

“We have to find him, Mary,” Cas urges. “ _Now._ ”

“How? We’ve tried everything.”

They have. They have tried locating spells, summoning spells, suppression spells. They have tried rituals, rites and runes. They have combed through every book in the Men of Letters library, contacted every witch that Rowena has ever known or heard of, and they have traveled from Canada to Guatemala tracking signs of the apocalypse that Michael has triggered.

Michael doesn’t come when summoned, no matter what combination or permutation of spells they try. They have always been at least one step behind him, if not more.

“Then we try it all again!” Cas shouts.

Mary recoils, a shocked look on her face. Cas falls silent, staring at her, daring her to challenge him.

“Guys, the fires out west, they’re getting much worse. Washington, Oregon and California, from Canada all the way down into Mexico, it’s all burning. They’re trying to evacuate 50 million people. They say the smoke from them will probably reach Kansas within a week. That’s him, it’s gotta be.” Sam is distracted as he enters the bunker’s library, focusing on reading from the laptop he’s carrying. But as soon as he senses the tension between Cas and Mary, he asks, “What’s going on?” Sam’s face is thin and drawn, almost grey even in the warm light of the room. His beard, fully grown-out and completely ungroomed, is flecked with white hair, adding to his disheveled appearance. He looks tired and ill, and were it any other day, Castiel would feel an old, familiar pang of guilt for not taking good care of Sam in Dean’s absence. But in this moment, there are too many other feelings - guilt has to take a backseat.

Cas gives Sam a significant look and says, simply, “Dean is alive.”

Sam’s face lights up and he rushes toward Cas and Mary. “He’s alive? How do you know?”

Cas nods, biting his lip, “I heard him.”

Sam accepts that without question. “Okay, we have to find him,” he says, echoing the only thought in Castiel’s mind.

“You both keep saying that,” Mary says. “But we’ve tried! We’ve tried everything. What else is there?”

Sam is the one to take up the mantle for Cas. “We,” he says, gesturing between the three of them, “will find a way. That is what we _do_.”

There is a sad look on Mary’s face. Cas doesn’t have time for that, doesn’t have time for this conversation. Dean is _alive,_ and Cas is suddenly hopeful beyond words. It makes him angry. He needs a minute.

Without a word, he walks out of the library and into the corridor that leads to the bunker’s bedrooms. He manages to make it all the way into Dean’s room before his knees go weak. Cas sits gingerly down on the bed, untouched since Dean made his deal, and puts his head in his hands.

Closing his eyes, Cas reaches out again, grasping for any sign of Dean. He listens as hard as he can for even the slightest hint of the low, familiar hum. But there is nothing. Cas is used to the absence, but after hearing Dean a few minutes ago, the silence is pressing on him. Castiel thinks his chest might cave in. He can’t breathe, even if he needed to.

Cas knows what he heard. He knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Dean.

Castiel also knows that the only way Michael could keep Dean from casting him out would be to push Dean down, down as far as he can. To give Dean his fantasies. To make Dean believe that everything is okay, but _better_ \- to give him the things he’s always wanted. That would be the only way to deceive Dean.

Cas doesn’t want to think about the things Dean’s always wanted. The last thing he wants to consider is _who_ tastes red. Castiel has spent the last thirteen months of his life spinning between anger and grief and hope and longing. He has been alive for four-and-a-half billion years, yet the last thirteen months have been an eternity of waiting and listening and searching and raging against the silence.

He is angry that it was the last thing Dean prayed to him - _I love you_. He is angry that he never got to _hear it out loud_ , full of rage at the fact that this is what they _do_ \- they push everything down, every tender thought, every damn emotion, until they can only spill out during the worst times. Like the end of the world. Or death.

Michael is building a world inside of Dean’s head. It’s almost like being trapped by a djinn, but stronger, because it’s an Archangel doing the trapping. Michael is using Dean’s own thoughts against himself. Castiel knows, because Castiel let Lucifer in - he remembers the apathy he felt, how little he cared about fighting back. And that was _without_ some rich fantasy life constructed for him. Instead of days or even weeks, Michael could keep Dean locked away for a lifetime. The lifetime of an Archangel.

Eternity.

He bows his head. For the first time, Cas prays to Michael.

_Brother, please. Let him go._

He can’t think of anything else to say, nothing else that he would want Michael to hear. Cas falls silent.

Cas hears a small, rustling noise coming from the hallway. He knows who it is without looking up. “Jack, come in.”

Jack walks into the doorframe, and Cas scoots over on Dean’s bed to make room, gently patting the spot next to him. Jack shakes his head and remains standing. He crosses his arms, fidgets a little and looks down at his shoes. Castiel gives him a minute, but when it’s clear that Jack isn’t going to say anything, he speaks first.

“Dean is alive,” Cas says. _Dean is alive_.

“I know. I heard you talking to Mary and Sam.” 

“So then you know that I heard him.”

“He prayed to you,” Jack says. He states it as fact, not a question.

Cas isn’t entirely certain how to answer that. He decides on honesty. “No, I don’t believe it was a prayer. At least, not in the traditional sense. I don’t think Dean knows that he did it.” Jack looks puzzled. Cas continues, “It is like when you woke me up in the Empty. You weren’t praying, as such, but you… longed.”

“Dean longs for you.”

“That’s probably not the right way to put it,” Cas answers. “But I could hear him.”

“So, he is…” Jack pauses, searching for the right word. He finally settles on, “...trapped.”

“Yes.”

“He is not dead. We will find him, Castiel.” Another fact.

Cas exhales a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, then admits, “I don’t know how, Jack.”

“We will.”

Cas protests. “Even if we did find him, I don’t know how to get through to him.”

At that, Jack finally walks across the room and sits on the bed next to Castiel. He raises one hand and puts it, reassuring but awkward, on Cas's shoulder. “ _You_ can get through to him.”

With everything he is, Cas wishes he could believe that.

“Jack, you know it’s much more complicated than that.”

Dean is Michael’s true vessel, his Sword. They can’t possibly know what Michael is capable of now. They can certainly guess - when Lucifer was using Sam, he was powerful enough to snap Cas out of existence, to break Bobby’s neck with a twist of his hand. Now Michael has ten times that amount of power, at least.

“It is. But he’s alive.” Sam has appeared in the doorway. He’s shaking his head as if he can’t believe it and yet always expected it. There’s a small, proud smile on his face.

It makes Cas smile back in spite of everything. “He’s alive,” he echoes.

“I am _so_ gonna kick his ass when we find him,” Sam laughs.

“Get in line,” Cas counters.

“Can I take a shot, too?” Mary chimes in. She’s leaning on the opposite side of the door from Sam, who looks at her and nods.

“Yeah, maybe we ought to have some kind of number system…” Sam chuckles.

“We can figure that out after we bring him home,” Mary says. She ducks her head and looks at Cas from under her bangs. There’s a questioning look in her eyes.

After a few moments, Cas purses his lips and nods at her. “Yes, we can.”


	3. Saudade

_Saudade (n.): A nostalgic longing to be near again to someone or something that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost._

It’s unseasonably warm inside the Impala, even with the windows rolled down. A rivulet of sweat makes its way from his hairline down the back of Dean’s neck before it slips under the collar of his t-shirt. The driver’s seat, usually one of Dean’s favorite places in the world, seems small and confined. He’s getting a cramp in his left leg, and he shifts uncomfortably in search of relief.

The styrofoam cup of gas station coffee that he’s been nursing is almost gone, and the last inch is lukewarm. Dean slugs it back anyway, willing the caffeine to kick in soon. He pitches the empty cup into a bag on the backseat and sighs.

“I am getting too old for this crap,” he complains, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. His head hurts a little and his neck is stiff and he’s just really not in the mood for this shit right now.

If he’s honest, and why the hell shouldn’t he be anymore, Dean wants to be back at the bunker exploring whatever this new thing is with Cas. It feels oddly fragile and unbreakable at the same time, and Dean’s taking it slow, adjusting into it like a shiny pair of dress shoes. It feels like, for as long as they’ve danced around it, the two of them ought to be able to just skip past the awkward hand-holding and do-we-kiss-goodnight-when-we-walk-to-our-separate-rooms? stage. He wants to touch Cas, _really_ touch Cas, and let Cas touch him. He wants to be naked and breathless and sweaty and spent next to Cas, and he wants to wake up next to Cas the next morning. But Dean also doesn’t want to go too fast, because he doesn’t want to miss anything. He feels like a damn girl about all of this, even though he knows that’s not a very enlightened thought to have.

Cas, who has been staring out the window, intently watching the house they are surveilling, finally looks over at Dean. “You can sleep,” Cas offers. “I’ll keep watch.”

“It’s too hot.” Dean realizes that he’s whining, but he’s too annoyed to care. He’s fucking cranky. This is the first real case they’ve pulled in months. It’s October in the Pacific Northwest, it should not be sweltering. But here he is, pent up and kind of horny in the front seat of his car, no relief he’s willing to pursue in sight, sweating through his shirt - and underwear, ugh - watching the house of a suspected werewolf. The only thing Dean has to be grateful for is that it’s not raining.

Almost as if the weather can hear him and has decided to be spiteful, a fat raindrop plops down in the middle of the windshield with a heavy _splat_. Dean glares at it, willing the sky not to start with him, but soon, more drops follow until it is raining steadily. He holds his palm out the window, but the rain isn’t even cool - it’s warmer than the air and stings his hand. He grunts and rolls the window up.

“What is the deal with this weather?” he asks rhetorically.

Of course, Cas has an answer. “Global warming,” he explains. “The atmosphere holds more water the warmer it becomes, up to a point. Precipitation increases about five percent for each degree of atmospheric temperature gain.”

“Fucking _science_ ,” Dean mutters.

“Of course,” Cas continues, “eventually the temperature will increase to such a point that precipitation will begin to decrease, at which point we can expect widespread droughts.”

At that, the rain intensifies. “Droughts,” Dean repeats.

Cas smirks a little, the expression crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Well, not this evening.”

“Clearly.” The rain is heavy enough that Dean can barely see the house a hundred yards away. A tree in his line of vision whips back and forth in the wind and a small patch of fog is starting to climb its way up the windshield.

Cas smells nice. It’s the only pleasant thing about being trapped in the damn car - his proximity to Cas. Dean considers reaching over to put a hand on Cas’s knee, but Dean’s hands are sticky with humidity. He wipes his palms on the thighs of his jeans and wishes for the millionth time that they were back in the bunker - the cool, comfortable, _climate-controlled_ bunker. Instead, Dean’s squinting through the windshield at a stranger’s home, unsure whether he’s hoping for or against a werewolf sighting.

He sighs again.

“Dean,” Cas says. His voice contains a bit of a warning about his own mounting exasperation.

Just then, Dean’s cell phone vibrates. He pulls it out of his pocket and checks the screen before answering. “Tell me things, Sammy,” he says by way of greeting.

“What is up with the weather?” Sam asks.

“Something, something, global warming, something, something,” Dean spits. “What did you find at the station?”

“There’s no way it can be Jake,” Sam answers. “He was playing in a football game during the second attack. Half the town saw him.”

“Okay, but what about the first mauling?”

On the other end of the line, Sam seems to be considering that, “So, what… You’re thinking _two_ werewolves?”

“Dean,” Cas says.

“Maybe,” Dean answers Sam. “It’s a possibility, right?”

“I suppose. They do run in packs.”

“ _Dean_.” Cas's voice is more insistent, and he grabs Dean’s elbow.

Dean looks over to where Cas is pointing with his other hand. It’s hard for him to see through the foggy windshield and the whipping rain, but he thinks he sees two large shapes moving in the shadow of the side of the house.

“Sam, call you back,” he says, hanging up the phone without further explanation.

Cas is already halfway out the car door.

“Shit,” Dean mutters as he hurries to grab his gun out of the glove compartment. He already knows it’s loaded with silver bullets. Dean tucks it into the back of his waistband as he simultaneously grabs his silver knife out from under the seat. When he opens his own car door, the hot rain sweeps over him and he’s drenched, even before he’s fully standing. As much as he’d been wishing to escape the car, this wasn’t what he had in mind. He slams the door behind him and takes off at a run to catch up with Cas.

By the time he’s closed the distance between them, they’re only a few feet away from the house. Dean can barely see through the downpour, especially with the warm water sheeting off his face in ribbons. As a result, he completely misses whatever causes the whomp and splat next to him. The next second, he’s on his back with a dude the size of a refrigerator straddling him. In the fall, his knife goes flying and he completely loses track of it.

Small favors - the dude on top of him blocks the rain; as a result, he can look over and see Cas, who isn’t more than an arm’s length out of reach. Unfortunately, he’s pinned just like Dean, splayed underneath another dude who is snapping his jaw aggressively in the general vicinity of Cas's neck. Dean can see sharp teeth glinting in the light of the streetlamps. One of Cas's arms is trapped under the guy’s knee and his Angel blade is a good three feet out of reach. Cas is trying to use his one free hand to smite the werewolf, but he can’t quite manage to make contact.

“Cas!” Dean tries to shout, but it comes out garbled as the one on top of him takes a swipe at his face with long claws. He turns his head in time to avoid the worst of it, but the nails catch Dean’s cheek and tear his skin. “Fuck!” he hisses.

“Dean!” Cas bellows.

Dean kicks up with his leg, bucking as hard as he can against the werewolf. He’s straining for any leverage he can get, but there’s no purchase to be found - everything is warm and slick and there’s blood in his eye. Through his one good eye, he can see as the wolf leans down, aiming its impressive fangs toward his neck. If Dean can time it just right…

It hurts like hell when he headbutts the werewolf, but it’s a good distraction. The wolf shifts its weight and Dean takes the opportunity to slam his fist into the creature’s throat. When it chokes and then emits a broken howl, Dean shoves as hard as he can and manages to free himself. On hands and knees, he kicks out blindly behind himself and makes brutal contact with an object that he desperately hopes is not Cas.

It’s not. Dean has kicked the other werewolf, causing it to roll onto its side and off of Cas. In one swift movement, Cas snags his Angel blade and stabs upward, delivering a direct hit to the heart.

The rain has washed the blood out of Dean’s eye, but his vision is more obscured without the monster on top of him. He’s too slow to react when it ducks down and charges at Dean’s knees. They hit the ground together, a heavy thump of tangled limbs. He feels something sharp - claws, he realizes - tear into and nearly through his midsection. Then the weight is gone as Cas pulls the monster up and off of him and stabs it through with his blade.

“Dean!” Cas calls out.

He can only grunt in return and clutch at his stomach. He can’t see much until Cas stands directly over him, blocking the deluge.

“Hold on.” Cas kneels on the ground and puts two fingers to Dean’s forehead.

The Grace is cold as it pulses through Dean’s body. Even though it stings like hell, he’s grateful for the momentary relief from the stifling heat of the rain and the ground and the air. Dean feels it rush to his injuries, coiling and coalescing to knit him back together. In an instant, the pain of his injuries is gone.

“ _Jesus-fuck_ ,” he says, breathless.

Cas rises and holds out a hand for Dean, which he accepts, allowing Cas to pull him to his feet. “I agree, in less blasphemous terms.”

“Let’s get back to the car.”

Dean takes off at a jog, aiming himself in the general direction of the Impala with Cas squishing along behind him. When he gets there, Dean climbs inside hastily and slams the door against the rain as Cas climbs in the passenger side. Dean only barely manages not to shake himself off like a dog, choosing instead to run both hands up over his face and down the back of his head, sloughing off the worst of the wetness from his head.

And then, before he can say anything at all, Cas's lips are on Dean’s.

It’s feverish, rushed and urgent and as hot as the air around them. Cas's body is turned awkwardly, but he doesn’t seem to mind, because he presses farther into Dean’s space.

Dean feels a sensation of familiarity and comfort wash over him, and he reaches his hands up to pull at the collar of Cas's trench coat. When he does, Cas opens to him and Dean flicks his tongue into Cas's mouth. Cas tastes of salt and winter and bright light and it sends the same cool rush through Dean that the Grace did, but without the harsh sting. Instead, it is as sweet as peppermint. Dean feels goosebumps rise on his bare arms even in the stifling warmth of the car.

“Dean,” Cas murmurs against Dean’s lips.

Dean responds by threading his fingers through the still-wet hair at the nape of Cas's neck and holding on. He works his tongue deeper into Cas's mouth, compelled to taste every inch as if he’s stealing it for himself.

Cas pulls away and presses his forehead to Dean’s. “Dean,” he says again, a little louder this time, then, “I know you’re in there.” He reaches up a hand and caresses the side of Dean’s head.

“I’m here, Cas,” Dean says, wrapping his free arm around Cas's waist. “I’m right here.”

“I thought you were dead.” Cas closes his eyes and grimaces.

“Hey, I ain’t going down because of some werewolf.”

Without opening his eyes, Cas smiles.

Dean leans forward to kiss him again, but there’s nothing there. He looks around, panicked. There’s no one else in the Impala with him. “Cas? Cas! Stay with me!”

Even though the rain is still pounding down outside, Dean opens the door. But as soon as he puts both feet on the ground, the rain stops and suddenly he is inside.

He looks up. The lighting is a bit dim, but he’s against the wall in a very large corridor. An incredibly large corridor - he can’t see where it ends. He can only see the way the flat beige walls curve very vaguely inward at the farthest reaches, like looking at the curve of the earth from the horizon. There is a plain steel door directly behind him and another one a few feet away, and another after that and another after that, stretching out as far as he can see.

“Fuck.”


	4. Hiraeth

_Hiraeth (n.): A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past._

“You should hear the things he thinks about you, Castiel. You should be ashamed, getting close to this _human_.” Michael is trapped inside of three concentric rings of holy fire, standing on a sigil drawn in virgin’s blood of very questionable origin. Sam is hurriedly preparing a fourth circle, pouring out the last of the jug of oil.

“This world is full of sin for me to purge, and yours will be next.”

They’re in what used to be Santa Fe, standing inside the disused remains of the San Miguel Mission. Since the fires engulfed the southwest, there’s no one left in New Mexico to use or maintain the oldest church in the U.S., but the adobe structure has held up better than could be expected. The theory is that Michael has a soft spot for being worshipped and didn’t see the point in destroying a church essentially dedicated to him. It’s the same logic that lured him into their trap here. Vanity, all is vanity.

Cas is kneeling, several yards away from the circles that contain Michael. There’s a smooth, gold bowl in front of him already half-filled with fragrant herbs and a small set of mismatched bones.

“It’s easy to keep him locked away in here,” Michael continues, pointing to Dean’s head. “Paint him a few pretty pictures, show him what he wants to see. He does the rest himself. Would you like me to show you what he sees, Castiel?”

Cas should be shaken, hearing these words from _Dean’s_ mouth, in _Dean’s_ voice, but he isn’t. It’s Dean’s body in front of him, but somehow, it’s not Dean at all - it’s not the same face, not the same expressions. This taunting creature in front of him bears as much of a resemblance to Dean Winchester as it does to the painting of Saint Michael on the reredos behind him, which is to say - none at all. Cas can ignore the jabs as he continues working, setting up the parts of the spell that Rowena has provided.

They’ve spent months working on this plan, all of them huddled together over books, herbs, maps and the darkest reaches of the Men of Letters archives, ignoring the world while it burned outside. They all had their parts to play. Sam did the research they needed - he found the church and learned its history. He confirmed that if they could ever summon Michael at all, it would be to this place. Once Cas and Sam agreed that she could use dark magic, things got a little easier for Rowena. She used the _Book of the Damned_ and the _Black Grimoire_ to build the spells that would summon Michael and hopefully keep him trapped.

Of course, that’s when Mary left. She’d been antsy about it for weeks once they started planning, arguing that they should be focused on saving the world, not on saving Dean. When Cas had argued back that saving Dean _would_ save the world, she’d suggested that maybe the easier solution was to take Dean out of the world. Cas had stopped speaking to her shortly after that. Then, when it came time to get the virgin blood… Mary objected. Now she and Bobby and most of the other refugees were off fighting on their own. Cas, frankly, was glad to have them gone. There were fewer distractions now.

And Jack, he’d spent the time testing the regeneration of his Grace. He had been weakened enough by Lucifer’s theft of it that he’d been practically human for more than a year. But then, slowly, his power started returning. Sam helped Jack to practice, like rehabilitating a broken limb, and his Grace grew stronger as he did.

“Let me show you, Castiel, the sins he wants to commit with you. Let me show you why you’ll be purged from this world.”

In some kind of odd tribute to Dean, Cas has taken up cursing, working to expand his vocabulary to include some of the more colorful phrases he’s heard Dean say. At this particular moment, however, he thinks the best one is, “Fuck off.”

Michael tsks. “Such language, Castiel. I suppose I should not be surprised by it, though. I hear him use that word often. Though, admittedly, in a different context.”

That is harder to ignore. Cas looks up from where he’s kneeling and narrows his eyes at Michael. “Dean,” he calls. “Dean!” He doesn’t know if it’s futile. Though Cas has been listening, as always, he hasn’t heard much from Dean over the last year. There are occasional fragments, bits and pieces, but usually not more than one or two syllables - he almost never hears complete words. He has never heard a prayer, which is how he knows that Dean is still trapped. He didn’t need Michael to tell him that.

“Stop,” Michael answers. He sounds almost bored, and his nonchalance boils Cas's blood. “He can’t hear you.”

“Ignore him, Cas!” Sam calls out. He’s finished drawing the final ring in oil and he strikes another match, dropping it onto the circle. “Do it now!”

Jack enters the room, approaching from behind Michael. He was hiding, deliberately out of sight, in the hopes that Michael would be too distracted to notice him. It seems to have worked, as Michael’s eyes widen just slightly when he sees Jack walk around and face him. Cas begins to recite the first words of Enochian as Jack holds up a hand. The contents of Cas's bowl start to give off a few light wisps of smoke.

“What do you think this abomination can do to me? I am an Archangel!” Michael exclaims, laughing.

Jack takes a breath and then channels his energy outward. The golden circles of Jack’s Grace flow from his palm into Michael’s midsection as Castiel continues the spell. When they first hit the Archangel, he leans backward as though the power makes him unsteady. Then Sam chimes in, reciting the old angelic exorcism that they are attempting to combine with Rowena’s suppression spell.

Cas cracks open a small shell and empties the contents into the golden bowl. He stirs the ingredients together and says the last of the Enochian spell, and the contents of the bowl spew upward in a magnificent purple wave. Cas slides the bowl forward until it is as close to the last circle as it can be without touching, then stands, watching. The spell work spirals in the air and heads toward Michael, hovering above him for several, long moments before funneling itself inside him through his ears and eyes and nose.

There is a rumble and a thump as the floor begins to shake and separate. The adobe ceiling, built of earth and water, heaves open with what could only be described as an exhausted sigh. Cas has to dodge out of the way of falling chunks. The air fills with dust particles. Black clouds swarm in the open sky above and lightning crackles.

Sam says the last words of the exorcism, finishing with a shout.

Michael grits his teeth, his fists clenched. His face is turning red with the effort of holding on inside his vessel. His chest is heaving where Jack’s Grace is pounding into him. “You cannot cast me out!”

Jack raises another hand. His eyes glow amber with the strength of the Grace that he is casting at Michael. He pushes forward, walking toward the circles.

Michael doubles over, covering his abdomen with his hands. Then he falls to his knees and tilts his face to the sky. “ _Imber fluit_!” he cries out. “ _Imber fluit_!”

There’s a deafening crash from the sky, and suddenly a torrent of water begins to fall from the clouds. It’s coming down in sheets. The circles of holy flames begin to flicker as the rain pelts down on them.

“Now! _Now!_ ” Cas shouts.

Sam pulls the Men of Letters’ hyperbolic pulse generator from the bottom of their supply bag. He slams his palm down on the sigil he’s drawn in preparation and chants the appropriate spell.

Suddenly, a small rip appears on Michael’s cheek. It glows blue with his Grace. A look of desperation passes over Michael’s face.

“I can kill him right here!” he shouts.

Jack stops and lowers his hands, looking at Sam.

“No, you can’t,” Sam counters. “If you could, you’d have done it by now! You _need_ him alive.” The pulse generator has begun to glow in his hands.

It’s risky, calling Michael out like that, but all of the research they’ve done indicates that the Michael Sword isn’t just Dean’s body, but also his soul. Heaven didn’t bring the Winchesters and the Campbells together just to make the bodies of Sam and Dean - it’s more than that. Strong vessels can be found, can be substituted, can be stolen. But _perfect_ vessels, those take time to build, years of bloodlines and generations of Heaven’s machinations. Everything they’ve read, everything that they have heard and seen, says that Michael can’t just burn Dean out - that it’s not the _perfect_ vessel without the soul inside.

“If you kill me, I will take him with me.”

“Let him go,” Cas demands.

“No!”

The crack in Michael’s cheek grows upward, tracing its way above his brow. Blood starts to drip into his eye. Rain continues to pour down through the open ceiling, and the innermost circle of holy fire flickers and finally gives up, burning out with a sizzle. When it does, Michael laughs and rises to his feet once more.

Cas tries again. “Let him go and take me instead. This is a strong vessel, and we will not come for you. Let him go!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Michael laughs. “This is my true vessel. And I am not threatened by _you_.” He waves a hand and the generator flies out of Sam’s hands and across the room behind Michael, where it lands in a corner and spins, useless and dead.

Jack moves closer, his toes nearly touching the outermost ring of fire. “Let him _go_ ,” he shouts, pushing wave after wave of Grace at Michael. They pulsate through the torrential rain and hit Michael in rapid succession.

“NO!” Michael shouts. He raises his arms up and the rain pours down harder, extinguishing the second circle. The third flickers and threatens to fail.

From where he is standing, Cas can see Sam behind Michael. He watches as Sam takes up the repaired Lance of Michael, and as Sam prepares to charge at the Archangel, Cas closes his eyes. He hears a sickening, sucking noise as the weapon pierces through Michael’s back. When he finally brings himself to look, the tip of the Lance is sticking out through Michael’s stomach.

Michael howls and the third ring goes out. He reaches behind himself and pulls the weapon out of his abdomen.

“This is _broken_ , you fools! Just like I will break you!” He tosses it to the side. “I will end you along with this world!”

The fourth ring of holy fire flickers, and Sam runs to Cas's side. “We’ve gotta go. _Now._ ” He tugs at Cas's arm, but Cas is only staring at Michael.

Twenty-nine months. It has been nearly two-and-a-half years since Dean said yes.

“Dean!” Castiel shouts.

Michael raises a hand and heals his own face. The sole remaining fire flickers again. “Cas!” Sam hisses.

But Cas pushes forward until he is standing next to Jack, who is still funneling his Grace at Michael. He puts one hand on Jack’s shoulder and he stops. “Dean! I know you’re in there.” His voice is half plea, half determination.   

Then he hears it, finally, the familiar voice in his head. It is loud and insistent and feels close enough that Cas imagines he could reach out and pull Dean to him. He says, _I’m here, Cas. I’m right here._

“Cast him out, Dean!” Cas calls, dizzy at the sound of Dean’s voice, sick with the longing it sparks in him. “You have to cast him out!”

“I am going to tear this world to shreds,” Michael says.

Just as the fourth circle extinguishes, Sam shouts, “Now, Jack!”

Cas finds himself standing on the field outside the bunker. The plan has not worked, and he falls to his knees, hopeless and lost. Sam walks forward and puts a hand on Cas's shoulder but says nothing. Jack remains where he’s standing, several feet off to the side. It’s raining here, too, not as hard as it was inside the church but enough to stream down Cas’s face in warm rivulets. Cas doesn’t feel anything - not the rain nor the wet soil seeping through his pants.

The ground beneath them shakes with a recognizable tremor - it’s an aftershock of a not-so-distant earthquake. The earthquakes have almost become rote, these tremblings. They’ve become accustomed to them over the past year. They’re barely worth commenting on, even here in Kansas. Except that this one is followed by a cry inside of Cas's head.

_Cas! Stay with me!_

“Dean!” Cas stands and shouts into the sky. “Cast him out! CAST HIM OUT!” he begs.

Cas falls silent to listen. As he always does, he pushes out his Grace, unwinds it from himself as if from a spool. The line that he is able to cast out is thinner now than it had been before. Heaven has powered down, all but Naomi gone. It is only a few days away from closing its doors, and he’s already feeling the effect of the diminishment on his power. Still, he aims his Grace in as many directions as he can, desperately searching for any connection to Dean, any trace of the familiar hum of his soul.

Cas waits several long minutes as the rain pours down. There is nothing.

He falls to his knees again. “Fuck!” he screams. He pulls a handful of mud from the ground and flings it away in frustration.

Finally, Sam pulls him to his feet and pushes him in the direction of the bunker door.

“He’s still trapped in there, Sam!” Cas protests against the rain.

“I know,” Sam says. “I know.”

“That was everything we had. There’s nothing else.”

Sam doesn’t have to answer.


	5. Lacuna

_Lacuna (n.): A blank space, a missing part._

He kicks the door to his bedroom open and stumbles inside, dropping his heavy green duffel on the floor. Dean is exhausted but wired, the way he often is when a hunt is done. It’s like he could sleep for days, if only he could figure out how to shut off his mind. But he never has, not when it’s like this. It takes a while for the adrenaline of a hunt to dissipate, and he knows better than to fight it.

Cas, behind him in the doorway, clears his throat. “Well, goodnight, Dean.”

“Hey, man, I’m pretty jumpy,” Dean says quickly, before Cas can duck away down the hall. “Thinking about watching a movie. You want in?”

Cas tilts his head. “What movie?”

“Feels like a _Ghostbusters_ kind of night,” he says, raising his eyebrows and waiting for Cas's approval.

Instead, Cas rolls his eyes and intones, “The last time we watched _Ghostbusters_ , you spent the entire length of the film complaining about its lack of realism.”

Dean smirks and toes out of his shoes, picking them up and placing them in the bottom of the small wardrobe that stands against one wall. “Well, yeah, that’s because ghosts don’t look like big potatoes. And ectoplasm isn’t green.”

“I still don’t understand what you find appealing about watching science fiction movies when you claim your whole life is science fiction,” Cas answers.

“Alright, fine, you can pick the movie,” Dean concedes, holding his hands up in surrender.

Cas nods. “In your Man Cave?”

“Nah, we can use the laptop in here.”

If Dean wasn’t watching a little too closely, he would have missed the faint surprise that passed over Cas's face before he schooled his expression back to neutral. But Dean was, and he saw. Dean pulls his laptop over from the desk and plops it down on the bed. “Make yourself comfortable,” he offers. “I’ll be right back.”

He grabs a pair of sweatpants and a fresh shirt from the wardrobe and heads down the hall to the bathroom to change. When he comes back, Cas has draped his trench coat and suit jacket neatly over the back of the desk chair. He is barefoot, his shoes lined up in the corner with the socks inside. Cas himself is sitting cross-legged on the bed, his tie loosened, top shirt button undone.

Grabbing the laptop from his desk, Dean boots it up. When it cranks to life, he opens up a browser window and navigates to his Netflix profile, clicking a few buttons quickly until the movie categories spread out on the screen. Then, he hands the computer to Cas and climbs onto the other side of the bed, stretching out his legs.

Cas pulls it onto his lap and begins to scroll, as Dean angles his head to see the screen. Cas flips through the Netflix category suggestions - he scrolls right past “Irreverent Cult Films” and “Inspiring Sports Films Based On Real Life,” but when he comes to the “Suspenseful Movies Starring Denzel Washington” category, he gives Dean a side-eye. “Hey, Denzel is _the man_ ,” Dean explains.

“I thought that Kurt Russell was ‘the man,’” Cas answers back.

“Kurt Russell is also the man,” Dean points out.

“But the implication inherent in the phrase ‘the man’ is that ‘the’ is singular and thus - “

Dean cuts him off. “Dude. Movie. Pick,” he says, gesturing at the screen.

“This one looks good,” Cas says, clicking.

“What the… _The Emoji Movie_? Seriously?” Dean rolls his eyes. His first instinct is to grab the laptop away from Cas and find something as close to _Die Hard_ as humanly possible, but he manages to squash that impulse down. “No, man. Literally anything else.”

Without looking at him, Cas says, “It says here that Christina Aguilera plays a super cool dancer. You enjoy her.”

Dean makes an outraged face and glares at Cas. “No, I don’t!” Sure, he can appreciate the occasional Taylor Swift song, but no, he draws the line at Xtina. Christina. Whatever.

At that, Cas looks over at Dean. “I heard you singing ‘Genie In a Bottle’ in the shower last week,” he says plainly.

Dean feels the tips of his ears turn red. “Cas, I swear to god… Seriously, dude? Why are you eavesdropping on me in the shower?”

“I don’t need to eavesdrop. You’re loud enough for the whole bunker to hear. Apparently, you feel like you’ve been ‘locked up tight for a century of lonely nights.’”

Dean is virtually speechless. All he can think to do is raise his index finger and point at Cas. “Shut the fuck up.”

Castiel holds up his hands as if in surrender and gestures toward the laptop, asking permission to start the movie. Dean bites the inside of his cheek and nods assent. Cas clicks ‘play’ and the movie begins to buffer.

As they wait for it to load, Cas finally looks at him again. “Dean, I have a question,” he says. His tone is serious enough to grab Dean’s full attention.

“Okay,” Dean says hesitantly.

There’s a long moment of silence while Cas seems to be considering something. Then a smirk slowly appears on his face as he opens his mouth and asks, “What happens if a person rubs you the right way?”

Dean’s eyes go wide and his jaw drops. “OH MY GOD. You fucking… fucker!”

Cas starts giggling, real, genuine giggles. It’s not like anything Dean has ever seen before - it’s just pure, unleashed mirth. Dean wants to be angry, wants to be outraged, but the grin on Cas's face and the maniacal laughter make that impossible. He can’t help himself - he leans over and kisses Cas’s smile.

The laughter stops as Cas sinks into the kiss. As the movie starts, Dean reaches out blindly and slams the laptop shut, cutting off the sound.

“Hey,” Cas mumbles a half-hearted protest against his lips.

“Shut up,” Dean answers. He reaches up and fists his hands into the collar of Cas’s shirt and pulls him closer, pressing their mouths firmly together.

Cas responds by threading a hand up and running his nails gently through the short hair at the back of Dean’s head.

Dean moves his arm to throw it around Cas’s shoulder. He traces his lips to the corner of Cas’s mouth and kisses him gently there, then shifts again to place an open-mouthed kiss at the bolt of Cas’s jaw. Dean is just tilting his head to explore Cas’s neck when Cas’s mouth lands on his earlobe. Cas bites down gently and his warm breath in Dean’s ear sends shivers down Dean’s spine. Every thought that Dean ever had about going slow disappears.

He wants to pull at Cas's clothes, strip him naked and rut against him. He wants to sink inside of Cas, take him, own him. And he wants Cas inside of him, wants to feel all of Cas against him, wants to be consumed by it. Cas is warm and just the right combination of soft and firm, and his stubble against Dean’s cheek feels good, and Dean longs to feel that scratch in many other places. He wants to feel so many things.

Dean tugs at the bottom of Cas's button-down shirt, pulling it out of his pants. He slides his free hand, the one that is not still wrapped around Cas’s shoulder, up to the naked skin at the small of Cas's back. Cas is warm beneath Dean’s palm, and Dean splays his fingers out to touch as much as he can at once.

Cas reaches up and loosens his own tie, pulling at the knot until the end slips out and it unravels. As he tugs it out of his collar, Dean moves to unbutton Cas’s shirt. He swats away Cas’s hands when he tries to help, and when Dean has all of the buttons unfastened, he slides the shirt off of Cas’s broad shoulders and discards it on the floor. Dean shifts his body to press up against Cas, leaning him back down until he’s flat against the mattress. Cas pulls at the hem of Dean’s t-shirt and Dean slides down and out of it as he makes his way down Cas’s naked torso with his lips and tongue and teeth.

Cas’s breath quickens when Dean reaches the waistband of his pants and palms at the outline of his hard cock. Dean mouths at him through the fabric, and Cas arches up and grunts in a way that has Dean fumbling hurriedly at the button and zipper of the slacks. As he tugs them open, Cas lifts his hips and helps Dean guide the pants down and off. Then Dean has his mouth on Cas.

It has been a long time since Dean did anything like this, but he knows what he likes himself and he knows what he has pictured doing with Cas. He lets that guide him. He plants a firm hand at the base of Cas’s cock and brings his fist up to meet his mouth when he moves it down.

“Dean…” Cas groans, his voice raspy and even lower than usual. The sound of his own name on Cas’s lips like that makes Dean harder in his own sweatpants, and he grinds against the mattress for friction. At the same time, Cas puts one hand gently on each side of Dean’s head, guiding but not pushing him down. Dean slides his mouth down Cas’s cock, taking as much as he can and then sucking his way back up, swirling his tongue around the head before diving eagerly back down.

He establishes a rhythm like that and before long, Cas is clutching at Dean and chanting his name like a litany. There’s a fire coiling tightly in Dean’s belly, and when he pulls off of Cas and stands, Cas sighs almost wantonly at the loss. The reality of Cas, naked and hard on his bed, is better than any of Dean’s fantasies, and he shoves his own pants down and steps out of them. He opens the drawer of his nightstand and reaches in, pulling out a small bottle of lube.

“Dean?” Cas reaches out and grabs Dean by the hand, pulling him back toward the bed. Dean climbs in and throws one leg over Cas’s midsection, straddling him. He flips open the bottle cap and pours a generous amount into his own right hand, then closes the bottle but keeps it in his other hand. Cas looks up at him with wide eyes.

When he reaches back, Dean can feel Cas’s cock, firm and hot where it rests against his ass. Dean gives it a few hard strokes with his lubed palm, slicking it up before turning his attention to himself. He bites his lip as he rubs two fingers in the space around his asshole, generously spreading the lubricant before pulling his hand away to add more from the bottle. Cas gestures for Dean to hand the bottle to him, but Dean shakes his head and tosses it aside.

“Not now. Need you,” is all Dean can say. He stretches his arm around and curves his back, raising his ass up to slide one wet finger inside of himself. It burns, but not unpleasantly, and he quickly adds a second, fucking himself hurriedly, in a rush to replace his own fingers with Cas. It feels urgent, the desire to have all of Cas in and against him _nownownow_. Dean impatiently removes his hand and reaches back for Cas’s cock.

The press of the head against his asshole is hot and slick, and Dean fumbles for a few frustrating moments while he tries to find the right angle. Finally, he does, and the sensation of Cas penetrating him is overwhelming. Dean forces himself to slow down until the _pain-pleasure_ melts into pure bliss. Then, he raises himself up slowly and sinks down again, farther than before. His breath escapes in a soft hiss as Cas says, “ _Dean_.” It is worshipful, the way he says it, and Dean cannot help but lean down for a filthy, open-mouthed kiss before he sits back up and begins to ride Cas’s dick.

Cas’s hands scramble for purchase, roaming over Dean’s bare flesh. He squeezes at Dean’s biceps, rolls Dean’s hard nipples between his fingertips and digs his nails into Dean’s thighs before landing one hand in a tight grip on his hip. With the other, he reaches out and takes Dean’s hand, twining their fingers together. He never breaks eye contact, staring at Dean with eyes so dilated that they are more black pupil than brilliant blue iris. When his mouth falls open and Cas begins to pant, Dean leans back, taking every inch of Cas inside himself over and over.

Finally, it is too much for Dean to look at Cas anymore. He throws his head back and closes his eyes as he grinds down, adding small circular movements to his rhythm. Cas thrusts up to meet him, and it hits the perfect place inside of Dean and sparks shower behind his eyes. Cas takes his hand off of Dean’s hip, and the absence of his touch leaves Dean’s skin cold until Cas touches Dean’s cock. At that point, Dean can’t feel anything but Cas, can’t tease apart distinct sensations. It is all Cas and only Cas, around him and in him in every way.

They tangle like that, gasping and groaning and maybe saying words like “fuck” and “god” and “yes,” but possibly only muttering half-syllables and guttural noises, for what feels like years. The best years of Dean’s life, though he knows it’s only been minutes. Soon enough, the sensations build inside of him and Cas quickens the pace of his hand on Dean’s cock.

“Let me see you,” Cas says, squeezing the hand that he is still holding. Dean opens his eyes immediately. “Let me see you come,” Cas asks. There is such unabashed awe and reverence on Cas’s face that Dean couldn’t help himself even if he wanted to. He spills into Cas’s hand and onto his chest, whispering Cas’s name over and over and over again.

As his orgasm ripples through him, Dean clenches around Cas’s cock, and Cas groans. He thrusts up twice more, heels planted into the bed and driving deep inside of Dean, and then, comes with a strangled noise that might be Dean’s name on his lips.

Dean is spent and sweaty, and he collapses on top of Cas, breathing heavily for a few long moments before rolling to the side. Their bodies are still aligned, Dean’s head against Cas’s bicep. Cas brings his other hand up and runs his fingers absently through Dean’s hair. Dean sighs contentedly and says, “That was… that was something else.”

“Since you have just defined it in the broadest possible terms, I have no choice but to agree with you.”

“Must you always be so literal?” Dean laughs.

Cas smirks, and it’s the same cocky expression that he’d worn earlier. Dean could get used to that self-assured smile. “You love it,” Cas says.

Without thinking, Dean answers, “I do.” And then, before he has time to second-guess himself, before he has a chance to talk himself out of anything, he says, “I love you.”

It’s not sappy, not some long, drawn-out proclamation of new information. It’s just fact, something he’s known forever, as plain as his blood type, his eye color and his hatred of kale.

And when Cas replies, it’s equally simple. “I love you, too. May I borrow some pants?”

Dean laughs and rolls out of the bed, snagging his own sweatpants from where they lay discarded on the floor. Then he turns to rifle through his dresser.

“A ha!” he exclaims when he’s found his spare set of lounge pants. Triumphant, he turns back around, but Cas is gone. The unmade bed is empty, sheets still rumpled. His pillow is strewn on the floor and the bedroom door is wide open.

“Cas?” Dean calls out, still clutching both pairs of pants. He looks around, then walks over to the doorway. When he pokes his head out, it’s not the bunker hallway that he sees beyond, but a large yet plain, undecorated room. He turns around to look back at his bed, but it is gone. The whole bedroom is gone, as are the pants he was holding. Dean is dressed, plainly but typically, in jeans, a t-shirt and a plaid flannel. Otherwise, there is nothing but the room, which is completely blank and featureless save for three simple wooden doors.

“What in the hell is going on…”


	6. Serein

_Serein (n.): The fine, light rain that falls from a clear sky at sunset or in the early hours of night._

Human. Fully, fallen, fragile, human.

Cas remembers this. It feels different this time around.

Last time, Cas had found it miserably difficult to be a human. He was lost, unmoored and confused. Purposeless.

This time, he doesn’t give a fuck about being human. He doesn’t care about brushing his teeth, never shaves and doesn’t bother eating except when Sam shoves half of a sandwich at him and insists that he chew. He traded his suit for a ratty old pair of jeans and a faded t-shirt that might have once advertised either a band or a taco stand. He thinks maybe the t-shirt gets swapped out for a different one every so often, but he’s not sure and doesn’t really care.

He’d held onto his suit maybe longer than he should have, certainly longer than was practical, but it felt like _him_. More than that, it felt like the _him_ that Dean knew, and there was some part of Cas that felt compelled to keep things the same - so that, when Dean came back, it wouldn’t be hard for him.

It was for that same reason that Cas spent his first nights as a human sleeping in room 15. It was the plain, nondescript room that had always been offered up to stray people who needed privacy or to rest or sleep. Cas himself had used it several years ago, back when he would spend the occasional night in the bunker. Back then, when everyone else would retreat to their own rooms at the end of the night, Cas would usually head to room 15, where he would sit primly on the green couch and read while the others slept. He’d felt like a stray back then, so the room suited him.

Then, for a while, room 15 had belonged to Mary, in as much as she ever really claimed anything in the bunker. When she left, she took everything of hers with her, including any evidence that she had ever occupied the room. So, when he needed a place to sleep that wasn’t face-down on an open book atop a table in the library, that was the room that Cas took. That was the room he’d always taken, and it was available to him, so nothing needed to change.

And then, one day, he’d heard Dean for the last time. Of course, he hadn’t known then that it would be the last time.

What he heard was his own name, whispered over and over. Not a prayer, but something akin to it.

Even with his relative inexperience, Cas knew exactly that tone of voice, understood exactly what it meant to hear his name in that way. Cas had heard Dean whisper it just like that over and over in his fantasies for years. He’d stopped having those fantasies three years ago, but the voice in his head, _Dean’s_ voice in his head, brought all of that back. Everything that he pushed down in the pursuit of Dean, it all came rushing in at once.

That’s when Cas moved out of room 15 and into room 11. Dean’s room. Into Dean’s bed. It wasn’t about the fact that Dean’s mattress was better than the standard-issue one in Cas’s room, nor was it solely about fulfilling some long-held fantasy about being invited into that bed. Rather, it was about feeling close to Dean. Dean was still in that room in a million different ways - the faded flannel shirt that still hung on a hook by the door, the burlap bag of rock salt on the shelf behind the bed, the neon-colored lollipops in the top drawer of his bedside table. Even Dean’s smell lingered on the furniture.

When Cas heard Dean say his name like a supplication, he abandoned his suit, moved into Dean’s room and promised himself that nothing would be the same if - _when_ \- Dean came back. He’d make sure of it.

If he noticed, Sam never said anything about where Cas slept.

But Cas is at a loss for how to get Dean back. They all are. And he’s not an Angel anymore.

They’ve tried talking to demons, tried summoning every single one of Crowley’s or Lucifer’s or Asmodeus’s goons. None of them have shown up, not for months now. That’s when Rowena left, telling them, “Boys, when evil itself runs away, you should probably think about running, too.” She found one of the last small covens that had managed to avoid Michael. Using _The Black Grimoire_ , she traveled back in time with them, though she promised to change what she could when she did. Of course, as far as Cas can tell, everything has remained the same.

Then, it was just the three of them, Sam, Cas and Jack. They kept trying, but it was like screaming into the void. They tried to communicate with The Empty. They tried summoning lesser gods, greater gods, gods that Cas knew from other planets. Nothing. Just like when he’d tried talking to the Angels, tried convincing Naomi that there was _something_ worth fighting for on Earth, he got nothing.

There is nothing left. Sure, there are werewolves and wendigos and an abundance of vampires, who have made a staggering comeback in recent years, especially once the sun started dimming. But there’s nothing left with any real power - any being that had the means to, has run away to greener pastures, as it were, locking the doors behind them.

Even Jack’s power is fading. Not as quickly as Cas’s did, but sure enough, it’s dimming. He used to be able to fly them all across the country, but now he can barely transport himself fifty miles. He’s still relatively strong, but they’re conserving his power for when they need it. Which is why they drove to New Mexico, taking burned-out backroads over partially crumbled bridges, never seeing more than two or three people together at the same time. Now, the three of them are standing together in the dull gray light of the noonday sun.

Shadows aren’t as harsh in the faded light and what should be a hot July breeze feels more like November. They’re in New Mexico, but it looks and feels like North Dakota.

This feels like their last shot.

They have come to Ship Rock in the hopes of speaking to Tsé Bitʼaʼí. The Rock with Wings is, after all, a real being, known to Castiel for millennia, though they have never actually met. The rock once cared for the Navajo, thousands upon thousands of years ago, when they crossed the Bering Strait to North America. Tsé Bitʼaʼí watched over them, guided their journey and protected them. And now it stands alone, guarding their dead - the number of whom has increased greatly over the last three years.

Cas figures a being with that kind of power who actually cares about humanity might be persuaded to help them out.

They have to wait until nightfall to approach the rock, given that it’s carefully watched and guarded by tribal elders against intrusions by non-Native people. Not that they expect to encounter anyone here, what with the smoke still hanging low in the sky, the evacuations and the crippling drought. But of all people, the Navajo would likely be the last to leave the land. Cas had suggested that he tell the Navajo that he’s more Native than they are, having been on Earth since just after the beginning of it all, but Sam had dismissed that idea out of hand.

The dimming sun means night comes on earlier and faster than ever before. They only have to wait a few hours, which they do in silence. There’s not much to be said between the three of them anymore, despite the ample room for idle conversation. There aren’t any topics to explore - they could talk about the fact that thirty percent of the oceans have turned blood red, or about the rations that the government put in place when crops started failing, but it feels beyond pointless to chatter on about the second trumpet of the apocalypse. On any given day, they mostly communicate through nods and grunts anyway; it’s not uncomfortable not to talk.

When night falls, they hike three miles from the road to the rock, the one that juts out of the earth just like an ancient being would - powerful and out-of-place. At the base of it, they stop.

“I can feel it,” Jack says. He reaches out a hand and places his palm flat against the surface of the rock. Then, he looks up, his gaze tracing all of the cracks and crevasses that shape the formation, all the way to the peak. “I can feel _them_.”

“‘Them?’” Sam asks.

“The souls,” Jack responds.

Confused, Sam casts a glance at Cas and raises his eyebrows. Cas shrugs and clarifies, “Tsé Bitʼaʼí protected the Navajo on their journey here. It’s not a big leap to think that he’s still protecting their souls, especially with Heaven closed.”

Jack nods. “So many souls,” he says, awestruck.

Sam purses his lips, a guilty expression on his face. “Alright, let’s do this.”

They can’t climb the rock - it requires ropes and harnesses and actual rock climbing prowess and twelve hours that they don’t have. But Jack can fly them to the top. He places one hand on Sam’s shoulder and one on Cas’s, and in the beat of a heart they are at the peak of the rock.

There is no pretense. Tsé Bitʼaʼí speaks first, though it is not in a human voice. It is more of a hum, yet completely clear and understandable. The rock vibrates under their feet when it says, “I know why you have come. There is nothing for you here.”

“You still have power, Tsé Bitʼaʼí,” Sam begins, tilting his head down in forced reverence. “Help us.”

“No,” it says.

Sam blinks. They have never discussed this outcome, never considered what would happen if the rock said no. As a result, he doesn’t even have a logical argument to present. Instead, Sam just says, “Please.”

“No,” the rock says again. There’s a small tremor, as if shaking its head.

Jack speaks. “Why?”

It scoffs. “I protect my people, the Dine'é, those who seek refuge within me, not those who stand upon me demanding favors.”

“It’s not a ‘favor,’” Cas explains, baffled. “It’s an imperative.”

“It is a favor, Fallen One. And I do not favor your kind. Or yours, Nephilim.”

“What about mine? I’m a human, just a human. Help me,” Sam pleads.

“I know who you are, _Winchester_ ,” Tsé Bitʼaʼí says contemptuously. “You are not ‘just’ anything. My answer is no. Find something else to bother with your request.”

“You’re the last ‘something,’” Sam says, his voice shaky. “You’re the last _anything_. Please.”

The rock stretches, in as much as a massive, ancient, holy rock can stretch, and says, “Fools. There is still power on this plane. You are not looking in the right places.”

Cas is fed up. “Enough of your metaphysical bullshit, you giant, useless hunk of stone! Help us!”

Tsé Bitʼaʼí quakes with rage. Loose rocks come sheeting from the wall next to them, showering down and making small craters where they smash at their feet, rumbling, “How dare you! You are a broken thing. You would come and demand my help?!? You are the cause of this!”

“The world is _ending_ ,” Sam cuts in before Cas can answer. “Your people are part of this world. You won’t protect them?”

“I do protect my people. I am their guard and their shepherd, now that I am the last. And why am I the last? Because of you!”

“Look, we didn’t mean…” Sam tries to mollify the being.

“You never mean!” Tsé Bitʼaʼí interjects. “You people never mean! But you do! You steal our land and rape it, you kill my people, you end the world, and you never mean! These are the consequences, whether you mean or not!”

“Help us fix it!” Jack yells. “Help us!”

“No.” There is a long pause as they all wonder what to say next. But Tsé Bitʼaʼí speaks first. “He knows you are here.”

“Michael?” Jack asks.

“Máíkel,” Tsé Bitʼaʼí replies. “The answer is always Máíkel.”

“What the fuck does that _mean_?!” Cas yells. He’s desperate to strike, to hit out at anything or anyone, but there is only bare rock under his feet and dark, clouded sky above.

The earth trembles as the rock says, “Máíkel is the beginning and the end of all of this. And if you do not go, he will be your end now.”

Cas has never felt more impotent, more frustrated, more naked and terrified and ready to die if that’s what it takes. His voice becomes a whisper. “Please. Please help us,” he begs. “Please.”

The rock is not moved by Cas’s display. “I have told you more than I should have. Go.”

Sam shakes his head. “But we don’t understand…”

“You will. GO!” And with that, Tsé Bitʼaʼí flings them away. Sam, Cas and Jack find themselves tumbling backwards as they land at the bottom of the giant rock. Lightning cracks across the sky and there is a great heaving of the earth. Cas thinks he hears a low, rumbled, “Run!” and then Jack’s hand is on his shoulder.

Cas blinks, and when he opens his eyes, he is standing next to the car, Sam opposite him and Jack beside him.

Cas turns to take a final look back. As he does, the sky turns bright blue as if it’s the middle of a completely normal afternoon. He has to shield his eyes as they adjust to the light, but when they do, the sight becomes clear. It is not the sky itself that is lit, but the souls pouring out of Tsé Bitʼaʼí - thousands upon thousands of years of Native souls. The rock formation is shearing apart in massive chunks as it unleashes its power.

“Michael is there,” Jack says, squinting. “I can see him.”

“What’s he doing?” Sam demands.

“I can’t tell…” Jack falls silent as a bolt of lightning cuts through the sky. It’s immediately followed by a thunderous roar, and from a distance it looks as if there’s a shockwave moving through the earth toward them. “I think we should go,” Jack says.

There is another lightning strike.

“Holy shit,” Cas mutters.

“Get in the car!” Sam shouts as the shock wave gets closer.

They do, frantically climbing in, Sam behind the wheel, Cas sitting shotgun and Jack in the backseat. The Impala roars to life, and Sam winces at the noise. The road ripples under them like a tablecloth being shaken out, and as Sam guns it, what remains of the asphalt begins to crumble and sink behind them. He presses the accelerator to the floor and Baby screeches, the tires spinning before the car jumps forward. They peel off down the road, Sam’s knuckles turning white from his tight grip on the wheel, Jack turned to stare out the rear windshield.

Sam glances at Jack in the rearview mirror. “What in the hell?”

The ground tremors violently beneath them. Jack, fixated on his view, says, “Michael threatened them. So Tsé Bitʼaʼí hurt Michael.”

Cas and Sam exchange a look. “Should we stop?” Sam asks.

As if in answer, the road disappears behind them, a crater opening wider and wider like a gaping maw. “I think you should go faster,” Cas intones through gritted teeth.

“Thanks for the fucking advice,” Sam snarks back.

Finally, the transmission shifts up a gear and the car picks up speed until they are outrunning the sinking ground, but only barely. Dust kicks up behind them, obscuring the backwards view, and all they can do is hope is that Michael is not pursuing them.

Long minutes pass as they race down the road. Finally, when it seems they are in the clear, Sam sighs. “What are we gonna do?”

Cas doesn’t answer. Instead, he closes his eyes, leans his head against the window and imagines the sound of Dean’s voice in his head.


	7. Mazarine

_Mazarine (adj.): A rich blue color. (a truly neutral blue, not too green or violet, takes its name from the wings of the mazarine blue butterfly)_

There’s a smudge of light grey paint on Cas’s forehead, just above his left eye. It makes him look like he has one normal eyebrow and one that is slowly evacuating his face. When he turns to Dean and says, “I want lunch,” the half-angry, half-curious expression that it gives him makes Dean chuckle.

Dean tears a paper towel from the roll and wipes at Cas’s face. Cas swats at him and grabs the towel away, leaving the empty living room to check himself in the mirror by the front door.

“Pizza?” Dean suggests.

“Kitty’s?” Cas asks, not looking away from the mirror as he scrubs at his brow.

Kitty’s Roadhouse is the first restaurant they ate at together in Hastings. It’s an unassuming place at the corner of Nothing St. and Not Much Else Rd., but they stopped in because of the name and have gone back multiple times because of the food, which is about as good as it gets in southern Nebraska.

Kitty’s is two miles away from the house they bought, the blue craftsman-style that they have taken to calling Cookie, after the monster it resembles with its two white-silled front windows. It was built in 1910 and, though it was hastily flipped a few years ago, it has good bones and plenty of projects for Dean to busy himself with. It’s a bit closer to the neighbors than would be ideal, but it’s a corner lot on an ordinary street in an ordinary town, and they are now ordinary residents. No one pays any attention to the former hunter and the Angel in a town where the weirdest thing that happens is the Kool-Aid Days celebration. No one cares who they used to be or who they are now.

Who they are is something Dean never thought they could be, even in his craziest imaginings: Normal.

Normal is relative in Dean’s life, of course. He’ll always keep a huge bag of salt at the bottom of the pantry and carry a lockpick in his boot. The first thing they did when they moved into Cookie was paint a devil’s trap in the entryway, and there’s a flask of holy water in just about every drawer. But Cas wears jeans now, and eats pizza, and they go to the movies and own matching dishes and are painting the living room light grey. Sam comes over for dinner every couple of weeks; it’s only a two-hour drive from Omaha, where he teaches at Creighton.

Life… is good.

“Yeah,” Dean agrees, then remembers to add, “but no pineapple.” Someone - Dean is blaming Sam - introduced Cas to Hawaiian pizza, which he immediately took to like, well, like someone who has never appreciated _real_ pizza, the kind without fruit.

“Get your own pizza, then,” Cas argues back good-naturedly. “I want Hawaiian. And I’d like to eat more than one slice, which is how much pizza you left me the last time.”

“Fine. But I’m getting a dessert pizza.”

“Okay, two things,” Cas says, finally turning away from the mirror. He counts the things on his fingers while explaining to Dean, “One: If you can’t have fruit on a pizza, then your apple dessert pizza isn’t a pizza at all. And two: One day, I may not be around to give your arteries a monthly magical cleaning. Pizza is not a food group in and of itself.”

Dean counts off his own points as he counters, “One: Apple dessert pizza is a pizza, because fruit is allowed on _dessert pizza_. Two: Where are you going?” He walks over to Cas and pulls him into a playful squeeze, the kind he’s only just beginning to get used to being able to give freely.

“I’m going to get the pizza if you call it in,” Cas explains, squeezing Dean back and then pulling away to toss his paper towel in the garbage bag on the floor.

“Cas, literal.”

Cas rolls his eyes. “I know, I was joking. I’m not going anywhere. Except to pick up the pizza.”

“You? Made a joke? No wonder I didn’t catch it.”

“You know, fuck off,” Cas says, flipping Dean a middle finger, then adding, “before I give you something to catch.”

Dean throws his head back laughing and grabs Cas by the wrist, pulling him close. He drops his voice and mock-seductively asks, “Is that sexual innuendo?”

Cas levers Dean’s arm around, spinning him to press his front against Dean’s back. He leans in to whisper in Dean’s ear. “I thought it was pretty blatant.” He plants a long, open-mouthed kiss where Dean’s shoulder meets his neck.

Dean shivers and reaches back, snagging one of Cas's hands in his own. He pulls it around, across his own chest, and kisses it - the palm, the back, and each of his knuckles. Then he pulls Cas’s index finger into his mouth and sucks gently.

Against his ear, Cas inhales deeply. “Dean,” he mumbles.  He bites and nips at the sides of Dean’s neck, sucking a hickey into his skin. Dean will be slightly embarrassed by that bruise tomorrow, but he doesn’t even think about that. He can’t think about it, not when Cas is nibbling at his earlobe, doing that not-so-secret thing that drives Dean crazy.

Dean takes a second of Cas's fingers into his mouth and sucks with more fervor, hollowing out his cheeks as he guides the fingers back and forth against his tongue. He feels Cas press his own crotch against Dean’s ass, feels the heat of Cas's groin even through both pairs of jeans. With his free hand, Dean reaches down to the button of his own pants.

Cas's hands are there, pushing Dean’s away to gracefully unfasten the denim himself. When the jeans are open, Cas reaches in and circles a firm hand around Dean’s already half-hard cock. He gives a light stroke, and Dean groans against the fingers in his mouth.

Dean wants his pants off, _now_ , but Cas seems determined to be slow. He breathes into Dean’s ear, just a low hum, and Dean pushes back against him. At that, Cas pulls his hand away from Dean’s mouth and turns him around. When they’re face-to-face, Cas ghosts his lips lightly over Dean’s, and Dean instinctively flicks his tongue out to taste Cas on his own. Then, Cas's lips are on his again, firmer this time. Cas wraps his free arm around Dean’s shoulders and pulls their bodies together. He’s still got a fist wrapped around Dean’s cock, stroking lazily. Dean sinks into the kiss, opening his mouth for Cas to slide his tongue inside.

Cas does, kissing Dean deeply. It feels like Cas's hands are everywhere - tangled in Dean’s hair, on the side of his face, tracing down his bicep, tweaking a nipple, pulling at his cock. Dean is overwhelmed by sensation, by the smell and taste of Cas. He reaches over Cas’s shoulders and tugs at his t-shirt. Cas breaks away just long enough to let Dean pull his shirt all the way off, and then his mouth is back on Dean again, roaming across his jawline with lips and teeth and tongue.

And then the warmth of Cas is gone as he pulls back and takes Dean wordlessly by the hand. Dean grunts, half protest, half assent, following Cas out of the living room. They laugh as they make their way through the maze-like over-crowded dining room, which holds not only the normal table and chairs, but is also temporarily housing all of the living room furniture as well. Cas heads up the stairs first, and Dean can’t resist smacking his ass on the way up. Cas looks back and narrows his eyes at Dean, but Dean just smirks and shrugs.

When they reach the top, Cas takes a left and walks down the hall to their bedroom, furnished with warm, masculine wood furniture. There’s a queen-sized bed in the middle, covered in a blue-grey comforter that Dean let Cas pick out. The bed is flanked by two end tables - one table is home to a tall stack of leather-bound books, while a laptop sits closed on the other. They have matching lamps, though Dean’s isn’t actually plugged in - there’s only one good outlet in the bedroom, owing to the age of the house, and the plugs are taken up by one lamp and the laptop.

As soon as they cross the threshold, Cas’s hands are all over Dean. He yanks Dean’s shirt up and over his head, leaving Dean’s hair a messy riot. Then he reaches down and tugs at Dean’s jeans, which finally ease down his legs until Dean can step out of them, along with his boxers. Cas does the same with his own pants, discarding them on the floor next to Dean’s. And then Cas is pressed fully against Dean, their bodies aligned, and Dean can feel Cas's cock hard against his thigh.

Cas leans forward and captures Dean’s mouth with a kiss, and while Dean’s eyes are closed, Cas takes both of their hard cocks in one of his warm hands. At the feel of Cas's length against his, Dean can’t help but thrust forward. Cas pulls back, just slightly, a graceful motion that somehow mirrors Dean. They fall easily into a push and pull rhythm there in the doorway, Cas's tongue inside Dean’s mouth when Cas thrusts forward, Dean’s inside Cas's when Cas pulls back. Dean takes Cas's hips in his hands and tries to speed him up, but Cas pulls away.

When Dean grunts a protest, Cas gives him a playfully reproachful look and pushes him toward the bed. Dean lands face up on the memory foam mattress that remembers them both. He grunts, and then Cas is hovering over him, his knees on either side of Dean’s waist. Cas leans forward, and kisses Dean’s mouth again, but quickly breaks away to nose at the stubble that shadows Dean’s jawline. Cas moves his mouth across the pulse point in Dean’s neck, tracing the vein with his tongue before moving lower still, shifting his hips as he fits his lips around Dean’s clavicle. He sucks another bruise into the thin skin there, which makes Dean grunt and thrust up, his hard cock seeking friction that Cas is in no particular hurry to provide. Instead, he moves his attention down to Dean’s bicep, kissing and licking at his muscled arm before he takes two of Dean’s fingers into his mouth.

Cas looks up at Dean as he sucks, and Dean is struck by how… _gorgeous_ Cas is like this. So struck, that it doesn’t even occur to Dean to feel silly at that; thinking of a man as gorgeous. Cas's lips are wet and just slightly kiss-swollen, and his dark hair is mussed. Dean reaches up and, without a thought, traces the thumb of his free hand over Cas's cheekbone.

“So good,” Dean says. “You feel so good.”

In response, Cas sucks harder, thrusting his mouth back and forth around Dean’s fingers while his tongue makes circles around the tips. It’s driving Dean to the brink of insanity, watching that mouth wrapped around him like that and wanting it wrapped around something else. As if Cas understands his thoughts, he finally pulls off of Dean’s fingers and leans his head back down to continue exploring Dean’s torso. Cas nips at the muscles of Dean’s abs, dipping his tongue into Dean’s belly button even as he reaches up and scrapes his nails down Dean’s flank. Dean shudders and threads a hand into Cas's hair, encouraging him lower.

Finally, Cas shifts his hips, positioning himself with his knees outside of Dean’s. The movement causes their cocks to brush together, and Dean arches up, hungry to be touched. Cas puts his palms on either side of Dean’s waist and ducks his head to lay a line of kisses from one hip bone across to the other, his stubble scratching deliciously against Dean’s cock. Then, he moves down farther to mouth at the slightly ticklish skin of Dean’s inner thighs. The sensation makes Dean twitch, and he thumps his head back against his pillow in frustration.

“Cassssssss,” he hisses, throwing an arm over his face. Cas's movements stop. Dean waits a few seconds before removing his arm and raising himself up on his elbows.

Cas is sitting over him, his mouth dangerously close to Dean’s cock, close enough that Dean can almost feel his breath. As if Cas had been waiting for him to look, he sinks his lips slowly down onto Dean, holding his gaze.

Dean can only stare at Cas as he’s enveloped by his warm, wet mouth. Dean isn’t sure which is hotter - the actual feeling of Cas around him or the way Cas looks with Dean’s cock in his mouth.  It takes every fiber of his willpower not to thrust up urgently, to grab Cas's head in his hands and hold him steady while Dean fucks his mouth. Instead, Dean holds still, clenching his fists into the sheets, as Cas lifts up and then takes him immediately back down. With one hand, Cas reaches down between Dean’s legs to gently massage his balls.

Breaking the stare, Dean tips his head back against the pillow and releases a full groan. “Ahhh, God, Cas,” he says, closing his eyes. Cas hums an assent, and the noise radiates through Dean’s body and up into his chest. It feels like his whole being is vibrating. Cas tightens his lips around Dean, creating the perfect amount of suction, while he places his free hand on Dean’s hip. Dean reaches down and, without looking, laces his fingers into Cas's.

It always feels good; the sensation of Cas wrapped around him, his warmth consuming Dean. It’s not like anything else he’s ever experienced - it’s so uniquely _Cas_ that Dean doesn’t even have a point of comparison. It’s the way that Cas smells and how he tastes and the noises that he makes, that they make together - Dean could spend forever sinking into Cas and would still want more.

That’s what he wants now. His mouth feels good on Dean, but Dean wants more, wants to be all the way inside of Cas. He puts his hands on either side of Cas’s head and lifts up gently. When Cas looks at him, there are galaxies in his eyes. It makes Dean confess, “I want you.”

“You have me,” Cas responds.

Dean slides his hands down, pulls Cas up by the shoulders and gently turns him over onto his back. Dean hovers over him. Cas twists a little and opens the nightstand drawer, pulling out the bottle of lube and handing it to Dean. Dean flips it open and pours the appropriate amount onto his hand. He pats Cas on the knee and Cas bends his leg, allowing Dean access. Dean reaches down and circles Cas’s hole with one finger, touching and teasing with the tip. With his other hand, he takes Cas’s cock and strokes him, working from base to head.

“Dean,” Cas grunts. Dean slips his finger fully inside and works it in and out. Dean adds a second finger, then a third when Cas gasps, “Please.”

When Cas is ready, Dean slicks up his own cock. He lifts Cas’s leg with one hand and, with a gentle push, slides inside of Cas and then stays still while he adjusts. It’s warm and familiar and somehow it gets better every single time they do this. “Dean,” Cas says again, and that’s Dean’s cue to start thrusting.

He goes slowly for the first few minutes, shallow little pushes inside, just an inch or two as he rocks gently back and forth. When Cas starts to move his hips to meet Dean, he drives a little deeper while still controlling himself. Cas grunts and grinds himself against Dean as best he can, and Dean takes just a second to marvel at how good Cas feels before picking up the pace. He builds to a familiar rhythm, looking down every once in a while, to watch his own cock disappear inside of Cas.

“God, Cas. Fuck,” Dean says.

“I’m… fairly… certain… that’s what we’re… _ah, right there_ … doing,” Cas answers between breaths. He finishes the sentence with a long, guttural growl and Dean chuckles despite himself. Dean tilts his head down and plants a random kiss on Cas’s knee.

“Dean. Harder,” Cas commands and Dean abandons all his remaining restraint.

He pulls Cas’s legs tight around him and Cas crosses his ankles behind Dean’s back. Dean buries himself fiercely inside of Cas, as far as he can go, then quickly pulls back and thrusts in again. Cas cries out, loud and uninhibited. Dean longs to hear more of that noise from Cas. He establishes a fast rhythm and Cas responds in kind, groaning and panting and calling Dean’s name.

Dean is close, but he wants to see Cas come. “Touch yourself,” he requests. Cas reaches one hand up to his mouth and licks a long, wet stroke across his palm, then wraps his fist around his own cock. Dean watches as Cas pumps into his own hand, matches his rough thrusts to Cas’s tempo. Cas tosses his head back and throws his free hand over his head, muscles tight as he grips Dean’s pillow and Dean fucks him hard into the bed. Cas’s breath becomes more and more ragged until finally he comes on his own hand. Immediately, Dean grabs Cas’s hand and sucks two wet fingers into his mouth, tasting all of Cas on his tongue and in his throat. A few more short strokes, Cas watching him with wide eyes, and Dean comes, thrusting through an orgasm that seems to last forever.

When he’s spent, Dean pulls out and collapses with his cheek on Cas’s stomach, not caring that Cas is sweaty and sticky. They lie silently like that for a long time just catching their breath.

Finally, Cas speaks. “I still want lunch.”

Dean bursts into laughter. “Alright, alright, I’ll call it in,” he says, rolling off of Cas and standing. He walks over to the attached bathroom, runs the water to wash his hands, dampens a washcloth once the water is warm and wipes at his cheek. As he peeks back into the bedroom, he lobs the washcloth at the bed, saying, “Clean yourself up, you filthy beast.”

But the washcloth lands on an empty bed. Cas is nowhere to be seen. “Cas?” Dean calls. He turns around, but he’s not in his own bathroom anymore. Instead, he’s in a small gray room, no larger than a closet. The room is entirely featureless aside from one smooth, plain black door directly across from him. Dean spins in a circle, but there is nothing but four walls and that door.

His mouth drops open. “Cas?” he calls. There’s no answer.


	8. Psithurism

_Psithurism (n.): The sound of rustling leaves._

They’ve been over this at least once a week for almost a year, and Cas is at the end of his rope. To his mind, there is only one option left - the one that Tsé Bitʼaʼí hinted at. Once they figured out what it meant when it said, ‘Michael is the beginning and the end,’ Cas knew it was the only solution. It was the only option from the very beginning, and Cas can’t believe he never saw it.

And now he can’t believe they’ve spent such a long time arguing about it. Fighting with Sam and Jack has been exhausting. They go back and forth over and over again, Sam insisting that they’ll find another way and Cas asking what the other way is.

And then, six days ago, the sun went out completely.   

Well, to be clear, Cas doesn’t know what, exactly, happened to the sun. It might still be there, just out of sight, hidden behind a dark curtain that Michael lowered on the world. It might not be this same cold, perpetual night everywhere else in the solar system for all Cas knows.

It’s not as if he cares, really. Cas stopped watching the news long before the news stopped broadcasting, and that was before seven out of every ten people died. Who knows if there are even any scientists left on Earth to figure out what happened to the sun? What does it matter?

It’s colder than he thought the end of the world would be. Cas always assumed that the world would end in fire, but in a world of constant night, it’s fucking _frigid_. In six days of perpetual night, the temperature has dropped significantly - he doesn’t know how accurate it is, but one of the monitors inside the bunker tells him that it’s 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside. The trees surrounding the bunker are hardy and they can probably survive for a while without sunshine, since they have stored sugar, but the temperature, as it dips lower and lower, will kill them pretty quickly. Meanwhile, the grass, flowers, bushes, grains - they’re all already dead, most likely.

The bunker still has power, though they don’t know how much longer that will last. When the worldwide power grid went down, something in or on or attached to or part of the bunker kicked on. They still have heat and warmth and light. They don’t have the internet anymore, or really any means of communicating with the world other than ham radio. Cas doesn’t much care, but in the absence of the world wide web, Sam has taken a keen interest in the amateur radio set up they found in storage. He spends much of his time scanning the dials and probing anyone he can find for information about Michael.

Cas spends his time doing research. He’s accumulated a two-inch thick stack of his own handwritten notes on the desk in his - _Dean’s_ \- bedroom, and dozens of other wads of paper of various degrees of usefulness are scattered around the room. They overflow from the trash can, fill the bottom drawers of the desk, and occupy the space left by the long-empty whiskey bottle in the trunk at the foot of the bed. There are papers everywhere. Some of them are neat, coherent notes summarizing enchantments and charms and curses in long-dead languages, and some are incoherent scribbles in English, Enochian, German and a hundred other languages that Cas remembers. Some papers contain useful information about things like the appropriate ratio of sage to dolomite in concealment spells, while others contain abstract doodles of barren fields filled with dead trees.

He’s also been putting together location spells from the giant store of ingredients he’s built up over the years. Cas does at least two each day and marks down the resulting locations on a large map of the world that he’s pinned to the wall over the desk. He’s got enough supplies to do three location spells a day for the next five years, he figures. Not that they’ll live that long, even if the conditions in the bunker hold out. They’ll run out of food in two years, maybe less if they don’t start rationing.

“No. No! That’s not…” Sam runs his hands over his face. The skin under his eyes is crepey and red. “Just… it’s not an option.”

“It’s the only option,” Cas says, gritting his teeth in an attempt to stay calm, though calm is just about the last thing he feels. “I don’t understand why we keep having this conversation.”

It’s simple - get into the The Cage. Take Michael’s Grace. Use it against the Michael who has spent the last four years dragging Dean’s body around, murdering the world.

Cas remembers that turn of phrase, ‘murder the world.’ He said it to Dean once. Told him he’d be the one who would have to watch him ‘murder the world.’ At the time, he thought it would hurt more to lose the world. Turns out, Cas was wrong.

“Because it’s not an option,” Sam answers.

It’s frustrating for Cas, the fact that Sam won’t even really argue with him about it anymore. He just keeps saying the same thing over and over - it’s not an option. At the beginning, when they figured it out, Sam would use logic and reason to talk Cas out of it. He’d throw out alternatives, no matter how implausible, and they’d chase them down to no avail. But the more conversations they had, the fewer alternatives, even crazy ones, Sam had to offer, until finally, he just started saying no.

Jack, who usually remains silent during these arguments, actually speaks up. “Sam, Castiel is right.”

Though it looks like Jack is going to continue, Sam interrupts him. “No,” he insists, holding up one finger. “Look, I know that no one is going to be rational about this…”

That triggers Cas, and he gives up on the pretense of calm. “There’s no sun! There’s no clean water! It’s the fucking end! We’ve put this off and put this off, and now look! We have weeks, _days_ left, maybe, before _everyone is dead_.”

Sam sighs and tucks his unkempt hair behind his ears, then scratches at his beard. “You don’t believe that.”

“Don’t you dare tell me what I believe,” Cas answers, his voice low and threatening. He steps closer to Sam, who doesn’t back away.

“Castiel,” Jack says, stepping forward and putting one hand on Cas’s shoulder.

Cas shakes it off. “No, look - I’m not having a philosophical debate about this. Chuck isn’t coming to bail us out this time, that much is clear, or he wouldn’t have let six _billion_ people die already. This _is_ the rational solution.”

Sam works his jaw back and forth before saying, “The rational solution is for you to kill yourself?”

At that, Cas throws up his hands. “Jesus Christ, Sam, what does it matter? We’re all going to die anyway.”

Sam fixes Cas with a steely gaze. In a low, dangerous voice, he asks, “Is that what Dean would want?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Sam, why don’t we ask him?” Cas says, advancing even closer to Sam, until they are toe-to-toe and Cas has to peer up at him. He feels his own face going red with rage. “Oh, wait, we can’t! Fuck you! Don’t use that against me!”

Jack, who hasn’t backed away, offers, “I could do it.”

Simultaneously, Cas and Sam both look at Jack and say, “Out of the question.”

“Why?” Jack asks, furrowing his brow. “It makes sense.”

“No!” Sam yells. He finally backs away and plops down in one of the library chairs, putting his head in his hands. His next words are muffled. “Would you two both stop?”

“I’m half Archangel,” Jack says. “I could hold it.”

“Jack, we’ve talked about this,” Cas says, totally exhausted. “We don’t know that.”

“Castiel…”

“No,” is all that Cas says. If that argument works for Sam, it should work for him, too.

Jack looks genuinely puzzled. “So, it’s okay for you, but not for me?”

“Exactly.” Cas sits down in a chair across from Sam and slumps backward, rubbing hard circles into his temples with his fingertips.

Jack tilts his head, the movement a perfect imitation of one Cas has made a million times himself. “How does that make sense?” he asks.

Sam finally looks up, shooting Cas an angry glare. “It doesn’t,” he says.

There’s not a lot of fire left in Cas. “I’m losing track of which side you’re on,” he says, shooting Sam a glare.

“I’m on the side where _we_ save the world,” Sam supplies, pursing his lips.

Cas leans forward and points one finger directly at Sam. “It’s _never_ been about saving the world! It has _always_ been about saving Dean, and you know it!”

Sam works his jaw like he’s about to say something, and several long seconds of silence pass. Finally, Sam pushes his chair back and stands. “I can’t anymore.” He turns and walks quickly out of the room.

Jack looks at Cas, but Cas holds up one hand and shakes his head. Jack makes a disappointed face but doesn’t speak. Instead, he turns and follows Sam out of the library.

Left alone, Cas waits for a second, listening to the sounds of the bunker. He hears nothing from Jack’s direction. He’s probably reading a pulp novel, one of the dozens that they found in a back storage room several years ago. After Sam commented on how much Dean liked the hard-boiled detectives found in many of those books, Jack had started making his way through them. At least he was well-past the phase where he called their guns ‘bean shooters.’

Sam, on the other hand, was probably stewing in his own bedroom, waiting to reemerge. Sam never backed down from these conversations for long, even though he didn’t have much of substance to say. It was almost as if he knew he had to stick close to Cas.

Which is why Cas moves fast. He’s been preparing for this moment for a couple of days now, gathering and hiding the things he needs. Cas has also tucked away a small notepad in a drawer in room 11 and left a very short note under a stack of paper on the desk.

Silently, he rises and goes to a drawer underneath one of the bookshelves, pulling it open to reveal the small chunk of fulgurite he stashed there three days ago. Palming it, he opens the next drawer down, where he’s hidden Gabriel’s blade. He takes them both into the kitchen, a room they barely use anymore. It’s easy to hide things in there now. Cas takes out a bowl and hastily combines the ingredients he needs, grabbing and setting up candles as he goes. When he’s ready, he slices open his own arm to draw the necessary sigil, then bleeds over the entire mixture.

“ _Te nunc invoco, mortem. Te in mea potestate defixi. Nunc et in aeternum_!”

Suddenly, Cas is not standing in the bunker’s kitchen anymore. Instead, he’s in a vast, black room covered in grey shelves. There are books stacked sideways on the surface of every one of them, crammed together tightly. There are books on the floor as well, in stacks as high as Cas’s waist. Billie is standing in front of him. She purses her lips and monotones, “I’m really very tired of you screaming for me. You’ve been yelling into the veil for years now.”

Cas bites the inside of his left cheek until he tastes blood. “Maybe if you had shown up literally _any_ other time that we tried summoning you…”

Death shrugs. “With Heaven closed, I don’t have to answer to summoning.” She gestures around at the shelves and the stacks. “I’ve been a little busy. Oh, and I don’t like you, on account of you killed me.”

“Then why now?” Cas asks.

“Because I’m curious,” she says, as if it’s obvious. “I’m curious what you could possibly offer me now.”

Cas shakes his head. “I don’t have anything to offer you.”

“Don’t you?” she smirks.

“What do you want?”

Billie takes a step toward Cas, and he takes a step back, maintaining the distance between them. She rolls her eyes at him. “I want to keep my job.”

He squints at her. “What the hell does that mean?”

“What do you think happens to Death when there’s nothing left to reap?”

Cas lets that sink in, chews on it as if he can taste the joke. It’s absurd, like having a conversation at the end of the world with a reaper that you murdered who became Death. That kind of absurd.

“...Death… Is afraid of dying?”

She doesn’t answer that question. Instead, she points one long finger at him accusingly. “You stop him. Or you kill him. That’s the deal.”

“I’ll stop him,” Cas says. He has to squash the impulse to wave his hand dismissively, to over-act in order to convince Billie.

But she is not fooled. “Or you kill him,” she insists. “It’s funny, don’t you think? You rebelled to keep him from saying yes, and yet…”

Cas rolls his eyes. “Yeah, it’s a fucking riot.”

“Oh, come on,” Billie chuckles. “You spent years trying to keep him from letting Michael in, and now _you’re_ going to go take him in. So many parallels.”

Cas realizes he never asked Billie to let him into the The Cage. He never had the opportunity to say the first word about his plan - she just knew. If he had the time, he’d find that creepy. He’d ask questions. But he doesn’t have the time and isn’t sure he’d want to know the answers. “Fine. Just to make you stop talking. I’ll do it.”

She smiles at him, and it’s almost sympathetic. “You don’t survive this, you know.”

“I don’t care.”

“I need to be clear about something, Castiel,” she says. She advances on him, and Cas finally stands his ground. “You’re not an Angel anymore. When you die, and you will die, you won’t go to The Empty. And there is no Heaven left, even if you deserved to go there. You’re not just going to die - you will _cease to exist_. There will be no deals to be made, because there will be nothing to deal for.”

He really doesn’t care. He wasn’t lying when he said that. It doesn’t matter to Cas anymore. There’s only one thing that matters to him, and it’s certainly not his own life. “It’s going to happen one way or another. Can we stop talking about it and do this already?”

And then he’s face-to-face with Michael in a dimly light room. It’s Michael, but it’s also Adam Milligan. Michael doesn’t notice Cas at first. He’s sitting, criss-cross-applesauce, in the middle of the room, tracing something in the air with his finger. Cas takes a hesitant step in his direction, and when Michael doesn’t look up, he takes two more and that’s when Michael sees him.

His face twists into a mask of confusion, but then resolves into recognition. He smiles childishly at Cas and breaks into song.

“Common sense may tell you,” Michael recites, “that the ending will be sad, and now's the time to break and run away.” His voice is sweet and light, and it echoes off of the walls of the larger chamber that contains the The Cage. “But what's the use of won’drin’ if the ending will be sad? He's your feller and you love him, there's nothing more to say.”

Cas squats down in front of Michael, and his smile melts into something twisted and fearful. He looks at Castiel with rabid, terrified eyes and backs away as much as he can. When his back hits the wall, Michael’s voice falters and the singing stops.

Cas inches forward until he’s close enough to touch Michael. “I’m sorry, brother. This… was never what I wanted.” Cas brings the Archangel Blade up from behind his back and grabs Michael by the hair. Without hesitation, he draws a two-inch slit across Michael’s throat. For a moment, the Grace behind the cut doesn’t move, just glows and pulsates. But when Cas opens his mouth, it starts to funnel out of Michael’s neck and into Cas. As it does, Michael resumes singing.

“Something made him the way that he is, whether he's false or true, and something gave him the things that are his, one of those things is you, so…”

It fills Cas up, the Grace, in a way that he had almost forgotten. It’s cold under his skin until it becomes part of him, and then he doesn’t notice that anymore. Instead, he feels better. He feels stronger, though oddly less than he felt when he had his own Grace at full power. He’s surprised how much even Archangel Grace dims in the absence of Heaven, but then he’s also grateful - if one Michael is weakened, the other one might be, too.

When all of Michael’s Grace has been drained, Cas heals his neck with a simple touch, and Adam, now alone in his body, goes silent, staring at Cas and rocking very slowly back and forth.

Cas reaches out his stolen Grace in a way he hasn’t been able to for so long. Castiel listens, crouched on the floor of the The Cage, Michael’s spent and useless vessel next to him. After a while, Adam sings again, his voice harsher, lower than Michael’s was.

“When he wants your kisses, you will give them to the lad, and anywhere he leads you, you will walk. And anytime he needs you, you'll go running there like mad.”

And then he hears it.

“Cas?”

Castiel spreads his wings and flies.


	9. Mizpah

_Mizpah (n.): The deep emotional bond between people, especially those separated by distance or death._

Dean doesn’t know what to do, but this feels familiar, like a choice he has been making over and over for years. It roils a nauseating sense of deja vu in his stomach. It feels like there is a word on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t quite find it. Instead, Dean steps forward and turns the handle of the door in front of him.

When it opens, the room inside is dim, but as soon as he steps inside, the small room behind him disappears and he is in the bunker’s kitchen. Cas is there with him, sitting at the table.

“Good morning,” Cas says, looking up at Dean and smiling. “I made coffee.”

Dean is suddenly struck by the fact that it doesn’t smell like coffee. Usually, when they do their kitchen routine - every morning the same for the last several weeks - the smell of Cas's coffee hits him before he even makes it into the room. He looks forward to that smell from the moment that he leaves his bed - it means that Cas is there, waiting for him in the warm, inviting kitchen. But this morning, the smell is noticeably absent.

Dean shrugs off the just-this-side-of-wrong feeling.

“Whatcha reading this morning?” he asks, choosing instead to slide into the seat across from Cas.

Cas dog-ears his page and closes the book. Dean reads the cover: _Did You Ever Have a Family?_ Dean glances back and forth between the book and Cas and cocks an eyebrow.

“A little light reading?” Dean asks, trying to keep his tone neutral.

Cas only supplies, “It caught my eye.”

This conversation is familiar. Not just because they talk every morning before breakfast, Dean meeting Cas in the kitchen where the too-bitter coffee is already brewed. No, this conversation almost feels like an echo, like shouting into the void and hearing your voice come back to you dimmer and faded. Or like playing telephone in school, whispering into someone’s ear, only to have your sentence come back to you distorted and meaningless. Dean shakes his head in the hopes that the feeling will dissipate. “I thought Metatron dumped the whole history of pop culture into your brain,” he says. He hasn’t poured himself any coffee yet, but he finds that the thought of putting anything in his stomach is very objectionable.

“Yes,” Cas concedes, “but this was published after that. I don’t have knowledge of it.”

“Huh,” is the best reply Dean can come up with. He doesn’t want to eat, but he knows what comes next, and the words tumble out of his mouth as if he can’t even control them. It’s not what he wants to say, but he asks, “Breakfast?”

He should be surprised at Cas's answer. Cas never wants breakfast, never sees the point in eating food that he can’t taste, much less in asking Dean to cook for him. He always shrugs the question off, though sometimes he does accept a cup of coffee with way more sugar than any human could stand.

But Dean’s not surprised when Cas answers, “Actually, I was thinking about a piece of toast.” In fact, Dean can practically mouth along with the words, like an old song he’s heard a million times. It’s strange, this feeling of almost-certainty that they’ve done this before while also knowing for sure that they never have.

And then suddenly, the room goes dim. Not completely dark, just dim, like when the lights go down in a restaurant at 7pm.

As if Dean has spoken, even though he hasn’t, Cas continues, “With jam. Or jelly. I’m not totally clear on the difference between jam and jelly.”

It’s not what he should say. It’s not what he _does_ say, something in the back of his mind tells him. But when Dean opens his mouth, he says, “What the hell is going on, Cas?”

“Dean?” Cas asks. He’s looking across the table at Dean, his expression innocent and curious.

And then the room finally does go dark.

There’s fire, so much fire, but it’s freezing. He can’t feel the tip of his nose or most of his fingers, and the wind whips through like a tornado, chilling him to the bone.

Cas is in front of him. It’s a different Cas than the one he was just with in the kitchen. This Cas looks haggard, rail-thin. His hair is overgrown, curling down past the nape of his neck, and there are flecks of gray at his temples and in the beard that is at least a month old. He’s got blood smeared on one side of his face - it appears to be coming from his ear - and he’s holding his left arm gingerly across his chest. Despite that, Cas has a hard look on his face, his eyes filled with steely determination.

But determination to do what?

“Cas?” Dean asks. He tries to step forward, to get closer, to help, but he finds he can’t move his own body, as if he’s not in control of it at all. When he looks down, there’s fire licking the tips of the monk strap shoes on his feet.

Dean can’t remember ever actually owning monk strap shoes.

All at once, Cas is directly in front of him, as close as he can get. He narrows his eyes and tilts his head, a gesture that is pure Cas even if the Cas in front of him is barely recognizable as such.

“Dean?” Cas says. His voice breaks, and even though Dean doesn’t know why, the sound chips away at his heart just a little. But before Dean can say anything, Cas continues, “You have to cast him out! Dean, you have to…”

Dean is in the kitchen again, sitting at the table across from Cas. Cas has a piece of toast sitting in front of him, slathered in orange marmalade that drips down the edges. There’s a plate with half-eaten, lukewarm eggs and a half a slice of bacon in front of Dean.

Everything is just a little askew. It’s almost as if he’s had a few glasses of whiskey and the room is tilting ever so slightly, except that sensation is pleasant and this one… isn’t. There’s a burning in the back of his throat and a horrible feeling that he has done this before, but differently. It feels _wrong_.

Still, Dean isn’t surprised when Cas says, “I don’t know why I asked for this. I know I won’t be able to taste it.” He sounds forlorn, almost heartbroken, but for some odd reason Dean feels completely unaffected by it. Instead, he’s focused on how the space around Cas seems to be glitching, blinking and dimming and suddenly disappearing for a second before fading back in.

Dean hasn’t spoken, but Cas looks at him as if he has and asks, “Isn’t it better to not know and have hope than to know and be disappointed?”

And then the kitchen blinks into nothing and he is crouched on the ground. It’s hailing, marble-sized pellets of ice pelting down on him from what feels like all directions. They sting and raise welts on his bare hands, which are an angry red from the cold. He looks up and sees Cas about twenty feet away from him. He’s huddled in on himself and clutching at his stomach. Dean can barely take a breath, the air is too cold, but he stays crouched down and makes his way over to Cas.

“Cas?” he says, reaching out cold fingers to grab at Cas's arm.

The kitchen is dark, not pitch-black but dark. Dean sits on the floor in here in the dark sometimes, his back against the cabinets, beer in his hand. He’s always liked this kitchen, the low hum of the appliances, the fact that it’s always just a few degrees warmer than the rest of the bunker. There’s something appealing to Dean about the idea of kitchens as gathering spaces, about the fact that they bring people together around food.

But now the kitchen feels strange. It’s cool, colder than it should be. More than that, it feels foreign. It feels like everything has been moved about six inches to the left, as if it is a memory constructed by someone who had never actually been there. Dean is seized by the sudden impulse to _run_ , to flee the kitchen as fast as he can, back to the warm confines of his bed. He considers it, considers leaving the kitchen and starting the day over again in the hopes that everything will feel _right_ again.

But Cas is in front of him, and he narrows his eyes, responding to something Dean didn’t say but remembers saying. “I don’t dream. I don’t sleep,” Cas states.

Somehow, Dean manages to ignore him. There’s a strange metallic taste in Dean’s mouth, almost like blood but with the afterburn of motor oil. Dean has a word on the tip of his tongue, maybe a whole sentence, but he can’t find it. It’s _right there_ , but he can’t figure it out.

Across from him, Cas rips a corner off of the piece of toast and pops it into his mouth. He chews contemplatively at first, but then a smile tugs at his mouth. He breaks out into a full-on grin, the likes of which Dean can’t ever remember seeing. With his mouth full Cas exclaims, “I can taste it!” He tears the rest of the piece in half and shoves it in his mouth.

And then there’s a horrifying sound, like the universe ripping apart. It’s metal grinding together and children shrieking and the wet sucking noise of a stab in the gut all at once, and it’s all Dean can do to stay upright. Cas is right in front of him, inches from Dean’s face. He’s bleeding profusely, the side of his head absolutely covered in blood, but he’s standing up straight and staring Dean right in the eye.

“DEAN,” he commands. “CAST HIM OUT.”

Suddenly, everything makes sense. And Dean does.

It’s a simple thing, casting Michael out - Dean just thinks, “Leave.” Everything glows a blinding white and then he’s alone inside his own body, freezing cold, absolutely starving and blinking, struggling to see around the halos the light left in his vision. The first thing that he thinks is that he wants a hamburger and pie and pizza and a cup of coffee or two or twelve.

But then a crushing, profound weight descends on him all at once and Dean’s knees buckle. He crashes, unseeing to the ground as the cold wind whips unforgivingly around him.

None of it was real.

None of it.

Not the marmalade toast. Not the teenage werewolves. Not his first time with Cas, not Kitty’s Roadhouse, not the blue house nicknamed Cookie. There was never an elated first kiss, no stakeout, no arguments about fruit on pizza. Cas has never made him coffee. He’s never kissed Dean in the Impala. Dean’s never said, “I love you,” and Cas has never said it back. They’ve never painted a room together, never had a home that was theirs, never built a life.

It’s too much, the despair that engulfs Dean in that moment. Grief for a life never lived, doors never walked through. He can’t help himself - Dean blindly turns his head, gagging, and vomits up bile, his body desperate to purge itself of things it does not have. He heaves and spits and gags until there isn’t even stomach acid left to bring up, and then he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and spits one last time as his vision finally resolves.

Cas is on the ground in front of him, clutching his stomach. His salt-and-pepper hair is inches too long and one side of his head is covered in blood and he’s sporting a beard that could best be described as “hobo chic.” He’s alarmingly thin, but it is Cas. Dean would recognize him anywhere.

Cas looks up at him, wide, blue eyes the only thing about him that seems unchanged, and says, “Hello, Dean.”


	10. Aspectabund

_Aspectabund (adj.): Being able to let expressive emotions show easily through one’s face and eyes._

Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been on fire for 60 years.

It started as an ill-advised landfill fire, just a little burning to clear out the garbage before the town’s Memorial Day celebration. But that fire spread, unchecked, through the coal seam under the town. It smoldered and burned for decades, causing sinkholes and releasing poisonous gas. Whole portions of the highway that ran through town disappeared, collapsed in on itself. Thousands of people evacuated the town, leaving fewer than a dozen hardy souls determined to live out their lives on their own terms, even as the government did the best it could to erase all memory of the town’s existence - they decommissioned its zip code, removed it from road signs and gave the only ambulance to a neighboring borough. The fire in the coal seam was predicted to last another 250 years.

Michael burned through the coal in an hour. Centralia continues to burn, but it’s no longer coal that powers the fire - it’s Hell itself. There are flames everywhere now, the fire roaring above ground as well as below. Cas would have thought there was nothing left to burn, but he would have been wrong. Centralia is a massive, sinking tunnel that leads directly to Hell.

It’s also where Cas finds himself landing. Not that he gives a shit about the town’s history or even cares about its name - no, he arrives in Centralia because that’s where Dean is. Cas’s senses are… different with Archangel Grace. Or maybe because he has Michael’s Grace - maybe that was how he was able to find the other Michael. Yet another thing that Cas doesn’t care about. The how and the why don’t matter at all to him when Michael is standing in the middle of the cracked, scorched and scalding hot road, sneering at Cas with Dean’s face that isn’t Dean’s face at all.

“‘For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?’” Michael quotes, then continues, stalking slowly up the road toward Cas, “I must say, Castiel, I did not think you would still be standing. There is something admirable about the length of your determination. The determination itself is foolish and wasteful, but the persistence of it…”

Cas interrupts him. “You really just enjoy the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” he asks. Michael is only a few feet away from him. From this distance, with Michael’s Grace inside of him, Cas can see all of the details about the Archangel. His true form has shrunk from the first time Cas saw Michael, back in his own world. Still, he is imposing. For a split second, Cas wishes that he could see his own form, wonders if it is larger or smaller in comparison.

Michael has not stopped sneering. He looks cocky, contemptuous. He lifts his face and sniffs the air. “You reek of stolen Grace,” Michael says. There’s a certain tone of disinterest in his voice, as if he is a human speaking to a particularly annoying mosquito.

A frigid wind ruffles the feathers of Castiel’s wings and, reminded of their presence, he spreads them out behind himself. “Who are you to talk about theft?” he answers.

“It’s my vessel,” Michael says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It was built for me.”

“Not in this world,” Cas clarifies.

Michael purses his lips, discontent accentuating Dean’s dimples. “Semantics.”

“Let him go, Michael. Let him go and I’ll let you live.” Cas lowers Gabriel’s Archangel Blade from where it had been resting against his forearm. He twists his hand to let Michael see it glint in the light of the surrounding fires.

Michael’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly. “You aren’t going to kill me,” he says, nodding at the Blade in Cas’s hand.

Cas tilts his head and takes the time to really study Michael. His wings seem battered, patchy, almost as if he’s molting. There are a few that even seem to be painfully bent in the wrong direction. Cas can see, now that they’re face to face, the wear that the last four years have caused Michael, and how weakened he is now. “Aren’t I?” Cas asks.

Michael states the obvious. “Killing me would kill him.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Cas bluffs. Of course, he has no intention of killing Dean. Not now, nor any time over the last four years. The time to kill Dean to save the world is long past, anyway, if it had ever been an option for Sam. It certainly never was for Cas.

“It’s never been about stopping me, has it?” Michael continues as if Cas hasn’t spoken. “It’s always been about saving him. What is special about this one human?”

Cas considers all of the things that he knows about Dean. He takes the time to mentally count each of the 42 freckles that are splattered across the bridge of Dean’s nose and onto his cheeks. He thinks of the nearly-girlish upturn of the corners of Dean’s mouth. Cas pictures the back of Dean’s head where his hair meets his collar, the place where small curls sometimes form when he’s gone too long between haircuts. He remembers Dean’s knuckles, dry and scarred from years of punches thrown.

In his head, Castiel hears the entirety of the Led Zeppelin mixtape, all thirteen songs. He recalls stolen hamburgers and a trench coat pulled from the trunk of a nondescript car. In his mind, Cas draws up the memory of Dean’s soul when he rescued it from Hell, how it was formless and terrified and how it lashed out at him but also called to Cas through the darkness. Cas remembers a young man, self-assured and somewhat belligerent, as hard-headed as anyone Cas had ever known. And he reflects on a mature Dean, one mellowed somewhat by a million small events, but still sharp at all of his edges.

Cas answers honestly. “Dean _is_ humanity. Save him and you save the world.”

Michael rolls his eyes. “Sentimental,” he says, pointing a finger at Cas. They’re close enough that it lands in the middle of Cas’s chest, poking him. “It’s been easy to keep him quiet, Castiel. Do you want to know why?”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Because he loves you.”

It doesn’t feel like he should say it, like he shouldn’t give _Michael_ the satisfaction of hearing the one word that Cas has always wanted to say. But it bubbles up and out of him completely unbidden, almost like a reflex. “I love him, too.” And in that moment, Cas finds, it doesn’t matter who hears it. It only matters that he said it, _finally_. He feels lighter, as if the weight of those three letters were rocks in his shoes, rubbing him raw and weighing him down for too many years. “Too,” Cas says again, just because he can.

And then it’s Dean in front of him.

Cas, if asked, wouldn’t even be able to articulate how he knows the difference. It just… it’s suddenly _Dean_ in front of him. But before he can even consider reaching out or shouting at Dean or doing _anything_ at all, he’s gone again, and Michael is there as if he never lost control.

Cas doesn’t need to consider what he does next. He balls his free hand into a fist and punches Michael as hard as he can in the jaw. In response, like lightning after the thunder, Michael hits out and lands a blow to the side of Cas’s head. It reverberates sickeningly through his ear and skull. His ear rings, even as he tries to shake it off. Cas twists the Archangel Blade around and slices toward Michael’s body, aiming to cut, not stab. But he misses as Michael spreads his wings and disappears.

Michael lands silently behind Cas and grabs Cas’s left arm. He pulls and twists, and Cas feels his shoulder dislocate as his radius snaps. Cas cries out, more in surprise than pain, and it’s a stark, startled noise. He kicks out and connects his foot with Michael’s knee. The Archangel’s leg buckles, but he doesn’t collapse. Instead, he stumbles backward a few feet, distancing himself from Castiel.

Then he is Dean again.

And then he says Cas’s name. “Cas?”

Hearing Dean’s voice out loud, Cas is struck by how different it sounds than when it’s in his head. The voice in Cas’s head is just a little more monotone, doesn’t echo off of anything, lacks depth. But Dean’s voice out loud, the way it wraps around Cas’s name and shapes it, curves it. It sounds as if the name has always belonged there, right on the tip of Dean’s tongue.

Cas finds that he doesn’t know what to do next.

In front of him, Dean tries to step closer, but there is a crack in the highway asphalt just inches from Dean’s feet. The gap is bursting with knee-high flames. Dean looks down at the pavement and squints, confused.

So, Cas steps forward. “Dean?” he asks, cursing his own voice for breaking. Cas swallows, then digs his nails into the palms of his own hands as he pleads, “You have to cast him out! Dean, you have to…”

Dean is gone again.

Michael lunges forward, snake-like, ignoring the flames that surround them to grab Cas by the neck. Michael punches him three times, then shoves him backward. The force of the push sends Cas hurdling at least twenty feet. “ _Descendit procella_!” Michael calls out to the sky above. In response, there is a crack of thunder and it begins to hail.

“You will not stop me,” Michael shouts above the din of the storm. “This is the end, Castiel!” And then, Michael begins to mutter. Cas walks closer, leaning his head toward Michael to better hear his words.

Michael says, “... _ab orbe terra_ ,” and Cas recognizes the angelic exorcism.

Cas flies to Michael and backhands him across the face. Instead of fighting back, Michael flies away, appearing a few feet behind Cas. He continues the chant, “... _Castiel omne obsequendrum,_ ” before Cas can get within striking distance again. When he does, Cas charges at Michael, but the Archangel dodges him before Cas can make contact.

“ _Domine expuet, domine expuet_ ,” Michael recites before spreading his wings and flying once more, just out of reach. “ _Ut deum ad empyreum remittat_!”

He cannot control it - Grace floods to the surface of Cas’s body, chilling him to the bone. He is blinded as it begins to leak in a blue-white glow from his eyes and mouth. Though Cas clenches his teeth, the Grace escapes him in waves. Cas huddles over as it does, trying in vain to hold it in. When it is gone, Cas hears a familiar voice.

He opens his eyes to see Dean standing over him, tentative and curious. “Cas?” Dean says, reaching out to grab at Cas's arm. In turn, Cas moves to get closer to Dean, opens his mouth to speak, but before he can, Michael returns.

Cas, caught off-guard and without the borrowed Grace, is an easy target. Michael stabs forward, and his own Archangel Blade cuts into Cas’s torso like a hot knife through butter. When it’s buried in him to the hilt, Michael twists his wrist, angling it upward. Without Grace, Cas can’t distinguish between the disparate sensations of the Blade piercing through his transverse colon, or up through his stomach and liver, or cutting into the pericardium around the left ventricle of his heart. He feels only ripping pain as his insides rupture and he begins to bleed out onto the scorched earth.

Cas does not immediately fall, and Michael does not remove the Blade. Instead, Michael drops his hand from it and clenches his fist at his side. A gleeful smile appears on Michael’s lips, and for what feels like an eternity, he and Cas stand face to face.

“I win. I will always win,” Michael says. “No one can stop this, Castiel.”

And then, all at once, the hail stops, and Cas is staring at Dean.

“DEAN,” he commands, desperation tinging the words. “CAST HIM OUT.”

It’s instantaneous. Dean’s head is thrown back to the smoky, black sky, a stream of bright blue Grace tearing from his mouth. When it’s gone, Dean is shivering, but he looks at Cas and smiles.

At that, Cas finally collapses to the ground.

He watches as Dean’s knees give out, too. His own arms and legs begin to throb. Cas’s hands are cold and trembling. Across from him, inches out of reach, Dean gags and heaves and vomits.

When there is nothing left, Dean wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. He turns to look at Cas and his eyes light up.

Cas’s chest is tightening. His entire body feels constricted, caught in a vise, squeezed from the inside out.

Here, at the end, there are a thousand words that Cas could say. There’s a long list of last words he’s said before, none of them particularly eloquent or elegant. In movies, last words are full sentences said through photogenic tears while parting lovers cling to each other. Cas has never had a death like that.

Sprawled out on the broken, still-hot concrete, Cas can feel himself getting lightheaded. Rational thought is becoming more difficult, but it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s so close to Dean, now. There’s no more need to think, to solve, to listen, to fight. The sky above him is getting lighter by increments, but he can’t tell, as darkness creeps in at the edges of his vision.

The fires around him still crackle and burn, but they are dying, just as he is.

Cas has never had a beautiful death and he never will. So, he chooses the two words he always used as a greeting to be his final farewell.

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel says, smiling.

Satisfied, he closes his eyes.

On the horizon, the first rays of the morning sun appear.


End file.
